HOUSING
October 2021 - January 2022
Rancho Mirage California, which come with a deck and a swimming pool, will have a starting price of US$595,000 compared with the average owner-occupied value of US$825,738. Prices are low because the owners don't have to pay for labour to build the homes. US based 3D builder Mighty Buildings told the Guardian up to 80 percent of the construction can be automated, with 95 percent fewer labour hours and 10 times less waste than conventional construction. On terms of emergency or special housing needs 3D printing is clearly the way to go. Another US innovator Icon has so far delivered more than two dozen 3-D-printed homes across the US and Mexico. Coming projects run the gamut from social housing to disaster relief housing to market-rate real estate. A project is also in the works with NASA to develop space-based construction systems that it hopes will eventually serve as habitats on both the moon
Plopping a 3-D printer from an American tech company into the heart of a rural village in Mexico was a big shift
and Mars. When Icon was founded, its biggest hurdle was convincing sceptics, Jason Ballard, Icon’s chief executive told the New York Times. “I had builders and developers explaining to me how it’s not possible to get concrete to do that, even as I walked them up to our 3-D printed house,” he says. “Now our biggest challenge is we’ve just got to make more printers.” An Icon partnership in
Nacajuca, Mexico is building a village for residents living in poverty in shanties with dirt floors, and prone to flooding in the rainy season. Building a home with Icon’s Vulcan II printer looks much like a massive softserve ice cream cone: Layers of lavacrete, the company’s proprietary concrete mix, are poured one after another in long swirls. The printer is controlled by a tablet or smartphone,
requires as few as three workers and can complete a home in less than 24 hours. Up to 500 new homes being built by New Story, a San Francisco non profit organisation focused on providing housing solutions to communities in extreme poverty. They can also be constructed to tolerate natural disasters: Nacajuca sits in a seismic zone. New Story has partnered propertyandbuild.com 65
