We’ve been hearing about the potentials of 3D printing for a while— but it looks like the technology has officially entered the housing sphere! A family in France is currently making headlines as the first to live in a 3D-printed house.
The house, located in Nantes France, is a 4-bedroom property spanning 1022 square feet.
It was built as a collaboration between Nantes city council, a local housing association, and the University of Nantes. The three organizations hope the home will serve as a prototype for bigger projects, which they say will make homebuilding quicker and easier.
Francky Trichet, council’s lead on technology and innovation, told BBC News:
“For 2,000 years there’s hasn’t been a change in the paradigm of the construction process. We wanted to sweep this whole construction process away.”
A team of architects and scientists designed the home on a computer. Once plans were finalized, the design was programmed into the printer and later printed on-site.
It took the team 53 hours to print the home’s structure and another four months for contractors to install items like windows and doors.
The structure is created by sandwiching cement between layers of polyurethane insulation. When everything is finished, it results in thick, insulated, and fully durable walls.
The home has interesting extras, including curved walls to reduce the effects of humidity, as well as accessibility and controls for the disabled.
The Ramdani family is the first to live in a 3D-printed house— the value of which sits at $207,000 (or £176,000).
After Nordine and Nouria Ramdani were selected to live there with their 3 children, Nordine told BBC News: “It’s a big honor to be a part of this project. We lived in a block of council flats from the 60s, so it’s a big change for us.”
“It’s really something amazing to be able to live in a place where there is a garden, and to have a detached house.”
The idea for the house came from Benoit Furet, the project’s head director at the University of Nantes.
“Social housing is something that touches me personally,” he said.
“Here, I wanted to create a house that is social housing, but with much more modern architecture.”
Currently, 3D printing a house is 20% cheaper than building an identical version through traditional methods.
As technology increases through the next ten to fifteen years, Furet predicts they could soon be built at nearly half the cost of a traditional model.
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