Tuesday, April 28, 2015

3d Printed House Project in Gardiner, New York Semi Stalled on Compliance With Local Building Codes

Last week, architect Adam Kushner presented updates on his plans for a 2,400 square foot 3D-printed house, pool house, and car port to be built in Gardiner, N.Y. 3DPrint reported on Kushner’s speech at 3D Print Week NY, where the designer showed more details of the planned home.

The builders will be learning on the fly during some parts of the project. They intend to be able to embed rebar into the printed material as it emerges, but discussions on how to do that are still going on. Giant 3D printers, 5 meters on each side, will be used to print the components in sections. The mind behind those printers is Enrico Dini, owner of a company called D-Shape which specializes in printing large items reinforced with a magnesium-based binding agent. The process of including rebar or steel-reinforced concrete in the printed material will have to be completed before the third stage of building the estate, the construction of the car park, can be completed, but in the meantime, the D-Shape printer and bonding agent can hold together simpler structures.

The base material will be native sand; the D-Shape printers are designed to use resources already present at the site in order to make residential 3D printing as easy as possible. Kushner’s planned house does not so much blend in to the surrounding environment as introduce a completely different, weirdly organic shape, as if coral had begun to grow in the forest.

The site was prepared for construction in August of 2014, but Kushner said in April of 2015 that construction is yet to begin. Compliance issues with the local building department have slowed down the process somewhat, and the 3D printer is being held by NATO, as it needed to be shipped into the country from D-Shape in the United Kingdom.

No comments: