Impact of 3d printing on architecture
Winsun, a Chinese architecture company, revealed the world’s very first 3d printed villa and a giant five-storey apartment. It is the first ever villa that’s 3d printed. Winsun has a huge printer in its showroom that prints these 3d structures. The villa is publicly available for exploration. The printer used rubble, steel, cement, binder and fiberglass to print the villa and it took more than 24 hours to dry it. Now here is a surprising fact – Winsun previously printed 10 houses in a day. The cost of each house was reported to be $ 5000. Same number of houses, if built the traditional way, would need no 3 months and definitely a huge manpower.
Winsun, Dutch Studio and Softkill Design are a few major companies that have been working for couple years on printing 3d houses. Now that Winsun has unleashed the very first 3d printed villa, it seems that it is pretty much possible to print not only just houses but entire cities.
Winsun now joined hands with an American financial company and they aim to establish 3d printer plants in 20 countries. In China, Winsun aims to create 100 such plants. Egyptian government has already signed a contract with Winsun for printing 20,000 houses for use in desert.
The idea is pretty much clear – we are moving towards 3d printed houses, cities and villages.
On the other side of the picture, Behrokh Khoshnevis, a pioneer of 3d printing is already working with Nasa on printing lunar structures. According to the Behrokh, we will see majority of the cities and houses being 3d printed in near future (approx. 5 years from now). This will eventually lead to printing of houses for low-income families at a massive scale and at government-level.
The future seems pretty obvious – we will be living in 3d printed houses and cities after a few decades. Why do we have to spend a few good months on construction