Printed in days, a house: the New York firm takes 3D printing to the next level

(Reuters): Most homes are built block by block or brick by brick. But a demonstration house was built in Calverton, New York, scanning scanning: its walls were made with a giant three-dimensional printer.

The demonstration house was built by the construction company SQ4D, to show the public and the industry what was possible. Now the company is selling one: a house yet to be built in the nearby town of Riverhead, which is listed on the Zillow property at $ 299,000.

With a separate garage, the house will occupy about 130 square meters. The bases, foundation and slab, along with the walls, will be done entirely with the 3D printer.

“We instruct the machine to turn around and follow your plant every step as we go. We build constantly,” said Kirk Andersen, SQ4D’s chief operating officer.

Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to fulfill their dream of house size.

“We took the idea of ​​a plastic 3D desktop printer and wanted to make it much bigger and spit out concrete,” Andersen said.

“We establish tracks on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We install our giant portico, our large-scale printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking them, building all the walls ”.

Andersen said the actual printing time of the walls took about 48 hours, as part of an eight-day global process to build the entire house.

This is significantly faster and about 30% cheaper than a house built with standard construction methods, he said, where workers need to tow and stack blocks manually.

“We present ourselves with a printer. We can replace the labor intensity of these guys and extrude the concrete much faster than the bricks can lay, ”he said.

Not everyone in the construction industry is delighted with this prospect, and the process has received mixed feedback, he said, with some particular skepticism from older traders.

“I think people are not prepared for how this will change construction,” Andersen said. “It simply came to our notice then. This is just scratching the surface right here. ”