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These 3D-Printed Houses Cost Only $4,000 and It Takes Just 24 Hours to Make Them

3D-printed houses are the new wave on the ocean of the construction industry. However, they are not always easy and cheap to build.

The prototype

Icon, a construction technology company designing 3D printers, and New Story, a non-profit organization from San Fransico have teamed up break some stereotypes.

The cooperation resulted in creation of a small house, worth only $10,000 in 48 hours. Icon refers to the structure as ‘the first legally permitted 3D –printed house in America’. But this is just the beginning.

Printed houses

A house with the floor area of approximately 650-square-foot is much cheaper than standard houses or apartments of the same floor area. Before the 3D-print technology was applied, New Story spent 8 months building 100 houses, each worth $6,000.

While the house prototype was being developed, the device designed by Icon was working at 25% capacity. It was enough to guarantee that the Vulcan printer can create a house of floor area between 550 and 650 square meters in 24 hours at the price of about $4,000.

Vulcan 2

Interestingly, an upgraded version of the printer, namely Vulcan 2, is already available and will soon be used to print cheap houses. The 3D model gives away a little of what we can expect.

Vulcan 2 is capable of printing the house without assembling individual elements. The printer distributes the layers of cement that forms the walls. Windows and doors are fixed later on.
Vulcan 2 can put up walls up to 8 ft tall and 27 ft wide.


Ambitious plans

The 3D printer was designed to be ultra-stable. It is controlled with a tablet. As a result, it takes only a few workers to create a house. Thanks to a special mixture of cement, the houses can resist even some highly extreme weather conditions.

The prototype of the house consists of a small living room, a bedroom, a bathroom and office space. Icon and New Story are going to build over 100 houses in Salvador, as the land characteristics and frequent floods make construction works there really difficult. The goal is to solve the problem of homelessness in the slums there.

Next objective? Printed houses in space! Icon is conducting research to find out how the technology can be used to build human settlements on Mars.

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