3D printing a house

There have been news reports on Gizmodo and IFL Science of an experiment in Shanghai using 3D printers to create housing. Construction is fast — an experimental ten-house village went up in a day — and cheap, around $5000 a house. Some of the materials used are recycled waste.

This uses a different technology than the Dutch experiment which aims at printing an entire house on-site. The Chinese firm, Winsun Engineering (site is in Chinese), instead prints components for pre-fab houses in a factory. Components can be large; the printer is 150x10x6 meters. The company's plans call for a hundred factories doing this in China.