Transitions in Housing

Posted by Rezwan on Sep 25, 2006 at 01:11 PM
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From their website:

Contour Crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California. Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.

Basically, it’s like a cake decorator or a dot-matrix printer that prints out a house.  Check out the site, they have cool animation.

Mechanized house-building.  Apparently, cement dries really fast.  They put chemical retardants into the cement to slow down the drying for human workers to have time to mix and spread.  With this new houseprinter gizmo, there’s no need to retard the drying.  Just squirt out the cement and build houses that dry really fast. 

You design the house on a computer, and it prints it out for you.  This means house design will conceivably become much more diverse, customized, and cheaper at the same time.  You’ll design your house on autocad or some other proprietary software, and print it out.  Genius.  In addition to cement, other building materials can be used, including wood, if they can be made into something that squirts (wood particles in a resin base?  More technical descriptions of this on their site).

And yes, this means the machines will be the builders of choice.  Is this another line of blue collar work lost to machines?

This is innovative, fascinating technology which promises to ultimately provide cheap, unique, tailor made housing for everyone.  Something that promises to raise the standard of living for billions of people in developing countries at a very low cost.  The downside?  That’s for construction industry and real estate industry to sort out. 

Actually, it may stimulate more work for everyone in those industries.  It will give new meaning to “flipping’ houses, as you can basically build a house in a few days, then change your mind, build another - it could make housing “disposable” - And there may be a rush to design unique houses and get rid of your old house - building boom.  Construction and de-construction.  Here’s to all of us finding ways to keep busy and cash in on innovations rather than be displaced by them.  And a big “heads up” on the shape those innovations are taking.