“Your shoes, clothes and car are already made automatically, but your house is built by hand and it doesn’t make sense.” That’s word from Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, whose team at USC is getting ready to debut a $1.5 million robot designed to build homes with zero help from puny humans. The bot should have its first test run in California this April, where it will build the shell of a two-story house in 24 hours. The operation is akin to a 3D inkjet printer, with the robot moving about in three dimensional space, spraying out the home layer by layer. Part of the simplicity of the process comes from the simplicity of the materials: nearly the whole house is built with concrete and gypsum, obviously leaving a bit of work for the decorators, but allowing for complicated shapes and cheap construction — about a fifth of current costs.
Don’t know about the architecture, but I love the idea of a home that won’t burn, won’t rot, won’t warp and won’t look like Thanksgiving Dinner for insects…
Much more: Flash demo.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Sam Chapman says:
Interesting about the concrete and gypsum house. I still want to see someone not in Europe use LitraCon, the translucent concrete. It doesn’t look to be a low end thing like the house you refer to you in your post, bit I’d sure like to see it over here.
January 15, 2007 — 3:14 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I still want to see someone not in Europe use LitraCon, the translucent concrete.
Actually, the bot described wouldn’t need much of a retrofit to extrude glass cooked up on the fly. A perfect structure, Fuller in full, with a sign out front: “Aw, go ahead. Throw stones…”
January 15, 2007 — 4:39 pm