Mighty Buildings (YC W18) can 3D-print houses, even the roof
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
$330/square foot is not cheap.
I live in a prefab home that was trailered in and placed on the basement with a crane. I visited the factory in Indiana, which was basically a lot of carpenters building homes inside of a warehouse.
https://www.rochesterhomesinc.com/tiptown
My house is 1568 square feet and looks almost exactly like the picture on the website. The price from Rochester was $120,000. From the factory, the house was almost completely finished (drywall, bathroom, cabinets, etc). Carpeting/flooring was done after the house was delivered, as well as some customizations and modifications for code (sprinkler system).
$77/square foot.
There are tons of other costs with building a house on vacant land, but those are the same regardless of how the house is constructed.
Mighty Homes has some really interesting technology, but there is definitely a premium to be paid for it. It's really, really hard to beat the economics of stick-built construction. At least right now.
I live on 14 acres of ag-zoned land in a very suburban area not too far from Chicago (30 minutes without traffic). Maintaining ag-status is a pain in the ass and eats up way too much of my time.
What does this mean? Do you have to plant some crops to be considered ag?
https://www.pslcomp.com/projects-catalog/houses-from-corkbea...
https://www.pslcomp.com/construction-technology/glued-cork-b...
And those which are built to a higher quality standard, indoors in a factory as you describe, but are not something that will begin falling apart after 5-10 years.
Unfortunately in many parts of the US and Canada any 'manufactured home' may be prohibited by zoning laws, because cities don't want more trailer parks. And they can be totally ineligible for the same rates of mortgage as a home built on site.
The quality of the build can be good or bad for either type, though cheaper materials tend to get used in manufactured homes since cost is usually the driver on those homes.
When I was building, I quickly learned that the first $50-100k I was going to spend went entirely to preparing the lot for construction.
The gif in the article shows a trivial L shape that could be extruded with a simple die. Granted the die would have to be quite large but a large scale 3D printer like the one shown isn't cheap either.
Pricing is not always a function of the cost, but a function of what the market will take. They also need to amortize all the investment they made on R&D.
The material used is more interesting than making prefab houses this way. Lots of companies make prefab houses, many of which are better and cheaper than these. Being able to 3D print big, weatherproof parts is useful in itself.
"Light Stone" appears to be a name used by Mad Maker Filament for NatureWorks 3D870.[1] It's high-temperature PLA (polylactic acid), a better version of the plastic used with 3D filament printers. I'm puzzled at the use of UV lighting. That's not something normally done with PLA, but it's not unknown. Also, PLA is a thermoplastic (melts and re-hardens to the same form) as opposed to a thermosetting plastic (changes molecular structure when heated.) Did they find something that can be heated to make it soft, put in place, and then hit with UV to crosslink the strands, like the plastics used for dental fillings?
[1] https://www.natureworksllc.com/Products/3D-series-for-3D-pri...
Compare the Lil Bubba Curb Machine.[1] This is a simple slip-form device for making road curbs and such. You pour in concrete, and it pushes itself along by pushing concrete into the slip form. The concrete is compacted by the push, and a smooth curb emerges from the output end of the form.
Somebody should combine pumped concrete 3D printing with a compacting device like the Lil Bubba. Then you could get smooth surfaces, not things that look like stacked layers of toothpaste.
This seems like the most interesting part; they're using a new material rather than just coming up with a new kind of 3D printer. The obvious follow-up questions are whether it's cheap enough, or strong enough, or environmentally sustainable to manufacture on a huge scale, and whether the material has a long usable lifetime and doesn't have flammability issues or off-gas any unpleasant chemicals.
Very important correction.
The way most suburban residential construction is done these days (at least in the U.S.) is to start with a large area, split it up into relatively homogeneous lots, and flatten them out as much as possible so that they fit the requirements of one of some set of floor plans that were designed without regard for any specific lot.
The alternative to this is to do custom designs that take the considerations of particular lots into consideration, like the position of the sun during the day, the direction of the best views, layout of the yard, etc.. This is expensive and hard to do on a large scale, because you can't amortize the cost of the architect over multiple buildings.
Another alternative is to have a software package that takes a given lot and generates a floorplan optimized for that lot (and the needs of the buyer, if known). This is a hard problem, but I think it gets easier, or at least more interesting, when combined with machines that can build houses. With 3D printing, the design can be as complicated as you want, with little impact on cost. You can have funny-shaped walls that aren't at right angles with each other, vaulted ceilings, gothic arches, flying buttresses, or any kind of ornamentation or functional feature without regard for having to consider the difficulty of expressing the design to human workers. If done well, it could be a major step forward for well-designed residential construction -- you get a custom building on every lot that's optimized to match the site rather than forcing the site to match the builder's requirements, and the marginal cost of the design work is low (probably more than zero, since you'd need a human to review the design and possibly negotiate with customers).
You're going to have to allow for a lot more negotiation with customers once you start adding "frills" - one reason that houses built in bulk are so plain is that tastes vary hugely and you have to bet on what flavor is going to be popular right when you want to sell them all. Flourishes are the kind of thing that will rarely make a sale but will easily break it.
Part of the developer's "brand" could be to invent new and interesting styles without getting too carried away with ornamentation for its own sake, or adding features that most people don't want.
Flying buttresses and gothic arches were kind of a silly example; probably most houses wouldn't benefit from looking like Notre Dame (especially if everyone started building their houses to look that way), but there may be other styles that would look nice and would fit well into their environment, but which wouldn't catch on now because it's too complex and therefore too expensive to build.
I'm struggling to see procedural generation of the designs as doing anything but subtract from the ability to conceive 'distinctive style a lot of people like', given that architects are people with likes, can talk to prospective purchasers about their likes and understand at a high level how people might use [or not use] particular design features and what designs regulators might reject.
Neural networks, on the other hand, produce outputs which are just a function of their inputs. Procedural building generation is what designers of 3D worlds use for the bits whose appearance they don't care enough about to detail by hand. The one place software design might lead to improved efficiency is randomising features for McMansions on a street from a simple library of squares and automatically generating the docs...
(Full disclosure, I haven't looked any further into it or even finished the podcast, so I'm not sure how much of that description is straight hype).
Episode: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/founders-fund/anatomy-of-ne...
Company in question: https://www.buildcover.com/
> The company is making homes in a variety of sizes, ranging from a 350-square-foot studio (starting at $115,000,
These two statements do not compute. I’m in the process of planning an ADU, and $115k for 350sq ft is smack dab in the middle of the ‘really nice’ prefab ADUs in the Bay Area, and as much as 50% higher than the less expensive options.
If these truly were cheaper, I’d be willing to take a risk on it.
I place 3D printed homes right up there with flying cars. It makes for great futuristic articles, sure, yet, outside of corner cases nobody wants or needs a 3D printed house or a flying car. One could make an argument that these are places where dollar bills go to die and will be so for twenty-five years or more.
I am puzzled because of notions such as product-market fit, traction, and “build something people want”.
Outside of that, anyone with experience in construction can rattle-off at least a dozen ways for which a 3D printed home could be undesirable.
Even better, anyone with experience dealing with construction regulatory bodies (Building and Permit, inspections, zoning, planning, fire) knows full-well how much of a surreal nightmare this can become.
As a simple example, LA County Building and Permit added six months and at least $50K to my solar energy project simply because it didn’t fit within checkboxes the people I was dealing with were used to. Trying to introduce materials not on the approved lists could take decades and millions of dollars. I learned more about this than I care to admit.
So. Yeah. Why?
I'm thinking this may be a more expensive prefab approach, and may not be better than current approaches.