San Francisco designer Yves Béhar has been using 3D printing technology since the 1990s. So he’s not as surprised as perhaps the rest of us would be to learn that soon you’ll be able to 3D print not only a house but an entire village.
Béhar’s firm, Fuseproject, teamed with New Story, a nonprofit that develops housing solutions for the developing world, and ICON, a construction technologies company, to build 50 houses for a community of farmers and weavers in Latin America (the exact location is not being disclosed until the construction phase).
Béhar said the breakthrough that made it possible to print a village was the ability to use concrete in a very large 3D printing machine. It allows for an inexpensive, structurally secure and flexible design process.
“You can shape the walls to have different functionality; you can create a shower stall that doesn’t have sharp corners,” Béhar said, adding that homeowners can specify a two-bedroom or three-bedroom plan and the exterior concrete can be tinted different colors “so it doesn’t become that cookie-cutter look.”
The printing, which will be done on site, is to begin this summer, and each building will take roughly 24 hours to print. Watch the printer in action at fuseproject.com.