<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Eric Hunting</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com">erichunting@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Thu, May 8, 2014 at 1:33 PM<br>Subject: Re: 3d printing houses in shanghai<br>To: Michel Bauwens <<a href="mailto:michel@p2pfoundation.net">michel@p2pfoundation.net</a>><br><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
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Recently, a number of articles and videos about 3D printing of
houses in China have gone viral, catalyzing a lot of attention for
this very promising subject. <br>
<br>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SObzNdyRTBs" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline;text-decoration:none;color:rgb(102,17,204);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?<u></u>v=SObzNdyRTBs</a><br>
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<a href="http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140401-10-completely-3d-printed-houses-appears-in-shanghai-built-in-a-day.html" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline;text-decoration:none;color:rgb(102,17,204);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)" target="_blank">http://www.3ders.org/articles/<u></u>20140401-10-completely-3d-<u></u>printed-houses-appears-in-<u></u>shanghai-built-in-a-day.html</a><br>
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Additionally, another 3D printed building project in the Netherlands
is also starting to garner attention.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJ6TVJYSdM" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObJ6TVJYSdM</a><br>
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3D printing has gained steadily increasing popular interest but the
limitation to the production of small artifacts has tended to see it
dismissed in significance. And controversial projects, such as the
printing of crude guns, have drawn negative attention from
easily-spooked and compulsively obstructive government authorities.
But with this demonstration of the technology's potential at a
relatively large scale people are finally seeing this as something
more than a technology novelty. <br>
<br>
But, to be sure, these projects are still in an experimental stage
and the printing techniques still relatively crude. Their most
practical early impact is likely to be in low cost and relief
housing applications where, confined to the one or two storey
dwellings, their structural performance isn't as critical. <br>
<br>
Being long interested in construction automation and, over this
year, working toward establishing the workshop needed for WikiHouse
participation, I recently wrote an Open Manufacturing post
speculating on the future of WikiHouse and the eventual application
of 3D printing. The concept isn't exactly new. Space scientists
suggested the sintering of lunar regolith for print-like building
construction in space back in the 1960s. This was followed, in the
80s and 90s, by architect
Nader Khalili's exploration of solar-thermal vitrification for
building construction. The first proposal of a house printing system
based on what we currently recognize as a '3D printer' and using
masonry materials was the Contour Crafting concept devised at the
University of Southern California. Unable to get support in the US,
this concept sat on the shelf for some years, the Italian company
D-Shape beating them to the first practical demonstration. It
appears that the Chinese system is very much lifted from the Contour
Crafting concept, though truth be told, Contour Crafting itself was
in some ways derivative of mechanical rotary boom-based slip-forming
systems developed in the early '80s, if not much earlier, for the
production of circular and domed luxury homes. <br>
<br>
I've long been puzzled by the focus on the notion of printing of
houses whole and in-situ by exceptionally large machines. This seems
a bit anachronistic to me--a throw-back to the sort of Big Machine
futurism illustrated by Metabolist design and the building concepts
of Jacque Fresco's Venus Project. <br>
<br>
<a href="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hayWrEZtjqs/TvRXpF_JF4I/AAAAAAAAv2U/LfSfDW2UN98/w800-h800/07.jpg" target="_blank">https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hayWrEZtjqs/TvRXpF_JF4I/AAAAAAAAv2U/LfSfDW2UN98/w800-h800/07.jpg</a><br>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gW-xn71WPPU/Tdgm-U2BGGI/AAAAAAAADZo/rSn6r3torKg/s1600/selferecthomes.jpg" target="_blank">http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gW-xn71WPPU/Tdgm-U2BGGI/AAAAAAAADZo/rSn6r3torKg/s1600/selferecthomes.jpg</a><br>
<br>
The chief problem I see is that the scale of capital investment
needed for such elaborate hardware limits its implementation to the
largest of corporations and may make it economically unsustainable.
Historically, the only disruptive modern innovations in housing
technology that have survived to the present day are those which
avoided a need for extreme capital investment and a limitation to
any specific aesthetic because industrialists have always felt there
was insufficient, if any, market for innovative housing. Commercial
architecture has often been flamboyantly diverse in its design and
technology but, because of the weirdly parasitic interdependence
between housing and personal finance and the way the real estate
market depends on the continuous ingression of labor into debt to
create virtual market value, housing innovation is dogmatically
resisted. The real estate market depends on housing being as utterly
inefficient as possible--and that's not a technological problem.
Across the whole 20th century, thousands of innovations in housing
design and technology were experimented with, Modernist designers in
particular obsessed with the notion of the industrialization of
housing as a means to overcome the modern blight of homelessness.
Virtually all these innovations were commercial failures. The things
that proved commercially sustainable were those innovations that,
for the most part, could remain 'hidden' behind the sheetrock, hence
the steady yet largely unperceived evolution of the typical American
home toward a composition of high-tech papier mâché. <br>
<br>
Thus I see the most critical factor for the viability of the 3D
printed house being the question of whether it scales to a level of
individual, small scale entrepreneurial, local community
empowerment. Not a question of innovating housing but rather how it
impacts the personal logistics and economics of acquiring shelter.
To put it simply, whether we can reduce this production hardware to
a physical scale tenable for the small entrepreneur and DIY
enthusiast. To make it an owner/build option. Thus in my post I
suggested the possibility of employing newly emerged printable and
compostable wood/plastic composites with a very light form of large
format 3D printer based on the cable-based Stewart platform or
Robocrane;<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/robocrane2.cfm" style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;vertical-align:baseline;text-decoration:none;color:rgb(102,17,204);font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:13px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;letter-spacing:normal;line-height:normal;text-align:start;text-indent:0px;text-transform:none;white-space:normal;word-spacing:0px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)" target="_blank">http://www.nist.gov/el/isd/<u></u>robocrane2.cfm</a><br>
<br>
With such a more modest machine and more easily handled material a
modest scale house can be printed in readily mobile sections in a
space the size of a garage or small warehouse. The focus would be on
the modular and simple, tapping into the same Tiny House trend that
the WikiHouse project and other CNC-based housing production schemes
have. This seems to me a much more practical approach and, of
course, we have seen something similar both these Chinese and Dutch
projects. Though shipped as complete prefabs, the Chinese printed
houses seem to be assembled from short bay sections much as I've
imagined--though with much heavier and more brittle masonry
material. The Dutch canal house project is using a series of varied
modular components, printed with a very large derivative of the
Ultimaker 3D printer which is nonetheless at a far more practical
scale of hardware than earlier proposed house printers like the
Contour Crafting system. <br>
<br>
But what does the prospect of 3D printed housing mean for the way we
regard housing and the way that influences housing economics? The 3D
printed house is, effectively, the ultimate made-on-demand
'blobject'. ( <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blobject" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blobject</a> ) As such it has
the very disruptive potential to decouple the value of housing from
property--the essential basis of the Ponzi scheme of real estate.
It's disposable and adds no value to the property it's placed on. It
can be replaced as cheaply as it might be repaired--potentially with
low environmental impact based on the kinds of materials speculated.
This is why the scale of the 'buy in' for the entrepreneur is so
critical. This technology will be suppressed by the established
finance industry as long as its implementation is
capital-dependent--like every other radical housing innovation that
came before it. <br>
<br>
The 3D printed house is in the peculiar situation that its most
practical near-term application--relief/low-cost housing--is the
greatest threat to its eventual mainstream acceptance because the
real estate market is extremely class and race biased. As soon as a
particular style of architecture becomes associated with a
particular social class it becomes damned from the presence of other
class communities--just as happened with the mobile home. Currently,
Tiny House architecture is tolerated in conventional communities
because it remains well camouflaged, discreet, and relatively rare.
That quaint doll-house look is rather crucial. 3D printed housing
can potentially be as flamboyant in design as commercial
architecture. It can get as wild as anyone's imagination, especially
when one needs no mortgage. Ironically, the worst thing a housing
innovation can do is aesthetically draw attention to itself. Even as
tolerant as the local culture may be, the Dutch canal house design
could only ever be a temporary exhibition. <br>
<br>
The 3D printed house is an artifact of another culture--a future
culture that our current culture has only barely begun to evolve
toward. Regardless of how it functionally performs, it's near-term
prospect is very likely to be exactly the same fate as befalls every
other form of alternative construction and architecture; embraced
for commercial/industrial/'special' use but, for housing, damned to
the edge of wilderness. Its first adopters will be those seeking
such alternatives to empower their 'unplugging' from the existing
culture and its economic constraints. It faces a situation similar
to that the late Nader Khalili faced with vitrified earthen
construction. His goal for that technology was to radically change
the situation of housing in the whole developing world. But he
sought to get the technology accepted in the west first because, in
his experience, innovations were only embraced in the developing
world culture when they had apparent acceptance in rich western
nations. The leaders in the developing world keep thinking they have
to 'catch up' to the west--as if we know what the hell we're doing!
He knew he could never break through to the mainstream western real
estate market, so took a very radical approach; he went to NASA
proposing buildings for the Moon...<div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div>On 4/14/14, 10:18 PM, Michel Bauwens
wrote:<br>
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</div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div class="h5">
<div dir="ltr">dear Eric,
<div><br>
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<div>I wonder if you could comment on this for the p2p blog ?</div>
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<div>i wonder if you address estethic issues ?<br clear="all">
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-- <br>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<b>Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February
8; I have no record of previous communication,
proposals, etc ..</b></div>
<div><br>
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P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>
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<br>
<br>
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#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a>
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</div></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><pre cols="72">--
Eric Hunting
<a href="mailto:erichunting@gmail.com" target="_blank">erichunting@gmail.com</a></pre>
</font></span></blockquote>
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</div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div><b>Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..</b></div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
<br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br>
<br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>
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