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3D Printed Structure Hints at House of the Future

Monday, October 29, 2012 12:10

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(Before It's News)

softkill-protohouse

When you think of the building you’ll live in–you’re home–in the future, I know this is exactly what you imagine. Ok, maybe your vision has a little more color, some nice rugs and a few robot servants to dust all the nooks and crannies, but this is pretty close. London-based Softkill Design is putting the question of using 3D Printing in architecture to rest, and likely raising more questions, with Protohouse, a scale exploration of fine living in the future, that was shown last week at 3D Printshow London. Here’s all the detail you’re hungry for.

Protohouse

Materialise helped out with the prototype of the print that includes and array of 3D printed solid and flexible material. All of which are used in the construction of the house that aims to lay the foundation of printed buildings for the future.

The Protohouse investigated the architectural potential of the latest Selective Laser Sintering technologies, testing the boundaries of large scale 3D printing by designing with computer algorithms that micro-organize the printed material itself. The project was founded at the Architectural Association School of Architecture’s Design Research Lab in the ‘behavioral matter’ studio of Robert Stuart-Smith. Research prototypes were generously supported by Materialise, with additional support from VoxelJet, and Sirris.

To dive a little further into this generative mass of plastic, the details on the Protohouse build from Softkill gives a better idea of how they imagine the future of custom-printed structures of fine living.

With the support of Materialise, Softkill Design produced a high resolution prototype of a 3D Printed house at 1:33 scale. The model consists of 30 detailed fibrous pieces which can be assembled into one continuous cantilevering structure, without need for any adhesive material. The arrangement of 0.7mm radius fibres displays a range of flexible textures and the ability to produce in-built architectural elements, such as structure, furniture, stairs, and façade, all in one instance. The Softkill house moves away from heavy, compression based 3d printing of on-site buildings, instead proposing lightweight, high resolution, optimised structures which, at life scale, are manageable truck-sized pieces that can be printed off site and later assembled on site.

So, we’ve got “lightweight, high resolution, optimised structures”. That isn’t too far off from what Airbus is imagining for aircraft. Will it happen? Some of you I’ve talked with think printing houses is absurd. What’s stopping us?