To review: In the world of sustainable real estate, they’re making hobbit houses out of straw bales, outfitting old shipping containers with green roofs and compostable toilets, and now, using 3D printers to build cottages. It can be hard to keep up, we know.
In Shanghai, the WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co created a tiny village using little more than an enormous 3D printer. The printer produced the houses’ walls, roof, and floors, which were then manually assembled. The layers of concrete used to create each component were partially made from recycled construction and industrial waste.
WinSun claims to have constructed the entire village, which includes 10 houses, in less than a day.
A hyper-insulated house made through lightning-fast production and with repurposed materials seems like a sustainable housing enthusiast’s wet dream, so what’s the catch? If you’re not partial to a fairly harsh and bare-bones aesthetic, you might not find these little abodes aesthetically appealing. But honestly, at just shy of $5,000 a pop, who cares?
From the Architect’s Newspaper:
WinSun estimates that their methods can cut construction costs in half and sees the potential for “affordable and dignified housing” for the impoverished.
None too soon, either, as a recent report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors found that BRICs nations are facing a shortage of affordable housing, as incomes fail to keep pace with rising real estate costs.
Tiny housers, take note: This might be the wave of the future for alternative homes.
