💡 Yes, you really can 3-D print a house
Architects reinterpret traditional forms with 21st century materials
In episode 5 of the podcast, we talk with Christian Romero about his proposal to 3D print houses in his native El Salvador out of concrete. He even suggested using the country’s plentiful coffee grounds to tint the concrete. He was inspired by ICON, a company that’s 3D printing cost-effective homes in Mexico and Texas.
Architects have many reasons to explore 3D printing. It’s an innovative technology that promises efficiency and affordability—but how “green” it is remains to be seen. Our 3D printers for model building at school use plastic feedstock, which has always bothered me. And concrete has its own negative impacts—such as the amount of energy that goes into making it. I find hope in articles like this about an architect couple experimenting with 3D printing organic materials - bioplastics, mud, dirt, nutshells, curry powder and, yes, even coffee grounds.
With resilient, biophilic architecture come cool building materials promising to be earth-friendly, recycled or recyclable, sourced from within 100 miles of a site, non-toxic, “natural,” and more. Other podcast guests, like Juhi Goel and Leah Clarke designed projects that showcase other materials: mass timber and algae in Juhi’s case, and reuse of wooden shipping pallets in Leah’s. (Juhi’s story is in podcast episode 2 and Leah is interviewed in episode 4.)
The sad truth is that all modern buildings contain toxic, carcinogenic materials (electrical wiring and plumbing contain polyvinyl chloride plastic) and are built with dangerous chemicals—glues, solvents, paints—that require special handling. Here, I thought it would be fun to give a sense of how many different materials go into an average house. It’s more than you think, what with the wiring, lighting, heating and air conditioning units, plumbing, finishes, paint, cabinets, glues and such—on top of the obvious items like foundation, structure, siding, and roof. I didn’t find a definitive number, but this website has gems like: “The average U.S. single-family house built in 2000 required 19 tons of concrete, 13,837 board-feet of lumber, and 3,061 ft2 of insulation.”
There’s a whole field of people working on what’s REALLY sustainable and how we know that. It’s a relatively new, evolving field that fills a critical role in our industry. As just one example, the 25-year-old New Buildings Institute is a robust think tank researching the climate impacts of building materials, so architects can make better-informed decisions. The Energy Efficient Buildings Institute also tackles the question in this article. Impacts of building materials are global and also acutely local; they encompass the environment and the health of construction workers and occupants.
Ideally, we design buildings to go beyond serving their communities’ needs—to uplifting their spirits as well. In Christian’s episode, we see how innovation means different things to different people. An innovative construction technique, like 3-D printing a house, doesn’t require odd shapes like the beehives and domes Christian was test-printing at home. The people of Guisquil that he polled via social media voted down his initial designs. They wanted houses that looked like houses. Luckily, as Cousin Greg observes on “Succession,” we’ve been building houses for a long time. There is plenty of precedent for what houses people well. Christian found a sweet spot by reinterpreting traditional forms with 21st century materials.