46 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • MARCH 2021
CALVERTON
FIRST-EVER 3D PRINTED HOUSE
Most homes are built block by block,
or brick by brick. But a demo house
in Calverton was constructed scan by
scan: Its walls were made using a giant
three-dimensional printer.
The demo house was built by construction
firm SQ4D Inc. to show the public
and industry what was possible. Now
the company is putting one up for
sale — a still to-be-built house in the
nearby town of Riverhead, which has
been listed on property site Zillow at
$299,999.
With a detached garage, the house
will cover some 1,400 square feet (130
square meters). The footings, foundation
and slab, along with the walls,
will be made entirely made by the 3D
printer.
"We instruct the machine to go around
and follow your floor plan each pass as
we go by. We're constantly building up,"
said Kirk Andersen, director of operations
for SQ4D.
Andersen and his colleagues had to
design and build their own printer to
fulfill their house-sized dream.
"We took the idea of a plastic 3D desktop
printer and wanted to make it much
larger and spit out concrete," said
Andersen.
"We set tracks on each side of the structure
where we plan to print. We set up
our giant gantry, our large-scale printer
goes back and forth, extruding these
layers one by one, stacking, building
all your walls."
Andersen said the actual printing time
for the walls took about 48 hours, part
of an overall eight-day process to build
the entire home.
That is significantly faster and around
30 percent cheaper overall than a home
built using standard construction methods,
he said, where laborers need to tow
in and stack blocks manually.
"We show up with a printer. We can
replace the labor-intensiveness of those
guys and extrude concrete much faster
than they can lay the bricks," he said.
Not everyone in the construction industry
is thrilled at that prospect, and the
process has received mixed feedback,
he said, with some skepticism in particular
from older tradesmen.
"I think people are just unprepared
for how this is going to change construction,"
said Andersen. "This is the
beginning. This is just scratching the
surface right here."
- Reuters
OPEN HOUSE
The outside of a proof of concept 3D printed house is pictured in Long Island, New York, U.S., February 11, 2021. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
A real estate listing sheet for 3D printed house for sale is pictured in Long
Island, New York, U.S., February 11, 2021. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
The kitchen of a proof of concept 3D printed house is pictured in Long Island,
New York, U.S., February 11, 2021. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
