Construction: Biomimicry and 3D printing

Next: Architecture options for Rented Offices

In three previous posts we’ve discussed the concept of modular building, what secondary effect it can have (houses that walk) and the role of data in housing.

It’s time to take a look at alternative paths to future.

Biomimicry and 3D Printing as Alternatives

3d printing buildings is an area that has drawn more attention in media than modular construction principles. It’s more visual and draws more clicks online.

It too has undeniable benefits. Using large 3D printers that extrude cement combined with robots that can lay out bricks or paint quickly walls and ceilings can take out substantial amount of manual labor, speed up construction and lower costs.

3D printing houses allows faster iterations than the modular approach. In the modular approach the factories for creating modules need to be created and when a new design is launched, the factories need corresponding changes. (This too is in flux as private networks inside factories enable fast reset of factory floors and flexible robots are taking more roles)

With 3d printing the product is essentially software that gets realised with generalised with 3D printers. This makes changing the design easy. It also allows to have a large “library” of different designs optimised for different construction environments. Generative design allows adapting fast to new constraints.

It still needs to be said that with today’s technology, 3D printing still needs to rely on people to lay plumbing, wiring, doors, windows, kitchen, bathroom and roof. And that’s a handful! This is something for the robots of the future to figure out most likely.

Biomimicry can become a complementing approach to 3D printing. In biomimicry the idea is to look at how nature has solved various structural problems during the 3,8 billion years of evolution. When species compete for resources in nature, the structures that minimize the use of energy and material give an edge. In nature materials are expensive (as gathering and using them consumes energy) but design is “cheap” because evolution has at its disposal a lot of time and is constantly experimenting.

This is true both for the forms taken as well for the materials used. 

Natural structures tend to have bends and complex structures that cause them to be strong with minimal use of materials. Using such constructs was earlier technologically more difficult that building stacked square boxes but 3D printing is enabling almost arbitrarily complex forms without added difficulty. The days of biomimicry may be near.

As an example from materials side: cement industries cause about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. In nature corals form material that is similar to cement but instead of causing emissions they actually take carbon from the atmosphere. Using that as guideline it’s at least in principle possible to develop processes that take carbon dioxide and seawater to produce calcium carbonate that can be mixed into cement.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/calera

Drawing inspiration from nature as a starting point and then applying generative designs allows to try out virtually hundreds of thousands or millions of designs before committing to anything hoisted in the physical world. This promises to radically reduce material needs and costs with the same or sometimes improved performance.

It may well be that the future belongs to 3D printed buildings constructed on site with 3D printed structures that are based on nature’s recipes slightly adapted with generative design.

https://earthsky.org/human-world/brent-constantz-builds-cement-like-coral-do/

And one more for the road. Office buildings are quite different from residential buildings (thicker frame, big changes whenever tenant changes, single owner etc.). What goes on in office buildings is mostly different services governed with software. What alternatives exist for an system architecture that the owner can consider.