At the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas, a prototype of a 3D-printed house was unveiled that was built to comply with all building codes. Its significant advantages include low cost and quick erection: printing of a one-story house with an area of about 60 m2 takes from 12 to 24 hours, financial costs are $ 10,000, and already now its creators are talking about an imminent price tag reduction to $ 4,000.
The idea belongs to a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley.
New Story, which has set itself the goal of providing housing to those in need around the world. The technical side of the project is the responsibility of the Texas startup ICON, which is looking for innovative solutions in the construction industry. In particular, the construction of a house in Austin was carried out using a Vulcan mobile printer, created by ICON.
The developers say that their project is able to solve the problem with housing in developing countries. The New Story organization already has a positive experience in this matter: in three years of work, it managed to raise money for the construction of 1,300 houses for low-income residents of Haiti, El Salvador, Mexico and Bolivia, and 850 of them have already been completed. Employees of New Story draw attention to the fact that local materials are used for housing construction, and local people are involved in work - to support the economy. The organization is now raising money to build 100 Texas-style homes in El Salvador. Note that, according to a report by the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities from the World Natural Resources Institute (WRI), today 1.2 billion people in the world do not have a normal home.
“There are also companies that print designs [using a 3D printer],” says ICON co-founder Jason Ballard, “but they are made in a factory or look like Yoda's huts. For this venture to be successful, these must be great houses. " Now the Texas building will be settled in a test mode in order to identify all the shortcomings, and put the already worked out version on the stream. In turn, we would like to challenge the opinion of Jason Bollard and remind about the construction 3D-project of the Russian inventor Nikita Chen-Yun-Tai: the house is being built right on the site and looks quite nice.
