A couple of days ago we posted about an Amsterdam based architect firm who are working on the world’s first 3D-printed house. The project will apparently take three years to complete and will not be anywhere close to cheap, though it will be fully completed.
And then there is a company in Shanghai who claims to have 3D-printed ten houses with inexpensive materials in less than a day.
There are some differences in approach though, as Chinese company WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co is printing with concrete of a sort, using “recycled construction waste, industrial waste, and tailings”. The folks at Amsterdam are using plastic, which is much more expensive. Then there are the measurements of the Chinese printer, which comes in at 150 x 10 x 6 meters. That’s a large chunk of machinery.
The end result is that the Chinese manufactured houses cost about R53 100, which looks to be much cheaper than the Dus Architects house, and according to 3Ders.org, WinSun is planning to build 100 factories in China to make their printer’s ‘ink”.
There isn’t much more info out there, but it will be interesting to see how the two different approaches to 3D printing pan out.
Source: Gizmodo