I disagree. It's common to see news headlines about things claiming to solve important humanitarian problems; they get shared on facebook, talked about over dinner tables, and online communities. They often ommit the downsides and alternatives, which in many cases (I speculate it applies here) make the product non-viable. For example: indoor farming, water-from-air schemes, solar-panels-in-surprising-places etc.

The HN community is more likely to provide a check on these claims - I think that's valuable. You'll find the acerbity is triggered by exaggerated claims, humanitarian claims, and lack-of-discussion of downsides. The TECLA page is filled with lines like this: "TECLA, a 3D printed global habitat for sustainable living". It sounds manipulative, makes me not trust them, and based on past experience, pattern-matches to most of their claims being false or exaggerated.

I agree (with your disagreement) ... "3D printed house" is one of those things that come up at dinner tables regularly.

"Hey you are into 3d printing, right? Have you heard about the new technology that allows us to print houses?!?"

Yes I have ... no it won't change the world ... yes this has been done for years now.

What I am more interested in is that robot arm on a truck that "automatically" lays bricks with mortar (substitute) inbetween.

The negativity is no more unwarranted than positivity. Each depends on what problem a person values. In terms of housing the unhoused this doesn’t do anything. In terms of aesthetic possibilities for people with money it provides another option where a wide array of options already exist.

In HN terms, this is a “rewritten in Haskell.” It demonstrates someone understands a bit about 3D printing. It demonstrates some ideological purity. It doesn’t demonstrate a better solution to existing problems.

The complexity of the logistical chain precludes wide spread application where housing is a basic need. You don’t just need the printer machine. You need a fleet of other machines to keep it full of ink. Shovels won’t do.

In the 1950’s, my mentor the late David Crane, FAIA was a young man. He enthusiastically designed precast concrete shelters for post disaster housing. Running the economics at the end of it, its viability was mostly limited to lower Manhattan.

People have been solving housing for millennia. Stick lumber and reinforced concrete are real breakthroughs by virtue of their commoditization.

This is wrapped up in secret sauce. Beautiful as with the myriad other beautiful ways to build.

Most choices are not between bread and cake. They are bread or nothing.

Something tells me the same things were said about early automobiles:

* People have been solving transportation for millenia

* Horses and trains are real breakthroughs

* The complexity of logistical chain (gas, mechanics, paved roads) precludes widespread application where transportation is a basic need

* You need a fleet of other machines to keep it full of fuel. Oats won't do.

* It does not demonstrate a better solution to existing problems

What is the thing that tells you?

It's called "Google".

Here's the first hit for "early criticism of automobiles":

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...

I am leaving it as an exercise to the reader to verify the extent to which your concerns mirror those of people 100 years ago.

I think the difference is that “concrete/lumber housing” to “3d printed housing” is not like “horses and carriages” to “cars.” Not saying it couldn’t be, but I think the point is that this experiment, although very interesting and cool, does not come close to demonstrating an analogous transformation (yet.)

Arguably, neither did the automobiles when they first appeared.

Nearly 30 years passed from the introduction of Benz's Motorcar (first automobile) to conveyor-belt assembled Ford's Model T (first mass-produced automobile).

It took about the same time from The Mother Of All Demos till the Internet became widespread.

So, let's check back in 30 years

The article does not contain the quotations you listed.

"In terms of housing the unhoused this doesn’t do anything"

"It doesn’t demonstrate a better solution to existing problems."

"They are bread or nothing."

And this guy starts off his reply with "The negativity is no more unwarranted than positivity."

Why do I always see these kind of comments on the top?

Does HN scrutinize everything based on the "practicality of things"? This article is multiple galaxy away from making such a claim. Why do people respond like the next million dollar housing solution is being advertised here?

I’m entirely onboard with aesthetics based positivity. There’s nothing wrong thinking Twinkies are the best things since sliced bread.

And that’s perfectly valid insofar as nutritional content is not a consideration. Insofar as a person has plenty of access to fresh fruit and vegetables.

Not everyone is so far up Madlow’s pyramid. Their needs are also legitimate. My comment is a response to the scolding of people who consider them in their judgment of the project’s merit.

> In terms of housing the unhoused this doesn’t do anything. In terms of aesthetic possibilities for people with money it provides another option where a wide array of options already exist.

Hey, that's me! I want one! I'm here to know if plumbing is included and if the exterior can look better, but I love this style on the inside. Its a mixture of Pierre Cardin's bubble palace and another aesthetic I've seen where the rockface of a mountain makes up the backwall of a contemporary home! I love it!

This seems like a cheaper way to do that, and I love the hue lights.

Its obvious that there is some metal and other materials that did not come from the earth at that site, and that therefore it cannot have zero waste as the company claims

but who cares, this guy (me) that can easily exchange earned resources for shelter does not care! I like the pictures and read it can be done in 200 hours. Uh, hello!

The part that can be done in 200 hours can be done with conventional methods in 200 hours.

Framing the superstructure of a building is always the fastest part. Site preparation beforehand and installing services and finishes afterwards are what takes most of the time.

Keep in mind that 200 hours is the time on site. It doesn't include lead time. If there are ten projects ahead of yours, you're 2000 hours out and because there is a dependency on a particular machine, you just have to wait. While you are waiting for your 200 hours, there will be weather delays on the other projects. Other owners will be like you and decide to add an extra room while the machine is there. Framing crews are largely fungible. Proprietary machines and materials are not.

So now it is finally your turn. Any other trades that need to be onsite haven't been sitting around waiting. They are off on other projects with their own schedules, delays, change orders and problems. Sure you scheduled them for 2200 hours out, but that turned out to be 3200 hours and the plumber will be free at the 3700 hour mark and the electrician at t=4000 hours. Because that's the way construction actually works.

It's why everyone has heard horror stories. It's why 200 hours sounds too good to be true. I mean how long will it take you to find a piece of land with suitable soil? How much time will it take to figure out where to put your strip mine on the property?

Also keep in mind that 200 hours is five forty hour work weeks (and 2000 hours a work year). That 3d printer has to be fed by someone and that someone won’t be working round the clock.

HN worries about the hard problems because they're real challenges that need to be solved before any improvements reach the wider market.

Nonsense. HN worries (enjoys, rather) problems that appeal to them. Linux running on a pen. A new programming framework demonstrates an abstract point. Etc.

What HN is doing here is internalizing cliches, responding to hyperbole/tropes they (we) assume is in the article. Also, the artsy-philosphical terms used by architects pisses off nerds. "Humane Architecture" and whatnot.

This is HN being silly, not HN being smart. We do both here.

Meanwhile, how is transporting materials vs equipment a Hard Problem?

Yes HN is great for championing useless projects, all the while crapping on the ideas that turn out to be huge; Dropbox, Gitlab, Coinbase etc.

Oh well, it is entertaining!

Yes, true. Picking winners is a hard game though... so I have sympathy for that part.

The part that bothers me is crapping on other fields for things we would tolerate, even respect in our own. If a tech company was messing with 3d printing experimentally, released some esoteric and impractical new database alternative or somesuch... We might criticise, but this reaction to experimental architecture is extreme.

I think a lot of it is the artsy language used by architects. It triggers HNers. Meanwhile, we appreciate abstract takes by pg, Stallman, or whatnot.

Consider: "Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community" - Stallman. This is OK to us, even though it probably sounds like meaningless ideological rambling to the uninitiated.

Meanwhile: "The aesthetics of this house are the result of a technical and material effort, it was not an aesthetic approach only. It is an honest form, a sincere form.” is intolerable to many the HN community. The base assumption is that the emperor has no clothes and regicide is the only solution.

I see your point (although I am allergic to Architect-speak myself!)

I am too, instinctively... though I consciously try to push through it.

OTOH, I think architect-speak is the actual glue between art philosophy and wider movements. Why is "postmodernism" (or modernism, etc.) an epistemology, political ideology, artistic sense and architectural school? They don't seem obviously related Why did Ayn Rand write about an architect to demonstrate her thoughts?

Logical or not, these "movements" are connected somehow and they to ebb and flow together.

There are a lot of lessons here for tech nerds. You could easily describe "agile vs waterfall" in modernist vs postmodernist terms. Apple & Google's product aesthetic does reflect typically modernist ideas... form from function or whatnot.

A couple of years ago I went deep into talking to literal flat earthers (friends, whom I love). I learned (and still processing) a lot. Anti-intellectualism plays a fundamental role, but the key parts are a level or two deeper to that. You need to realize that psychologists, political "think tankers," dieticians or economists actually do present themselves as equally authoritative to physicists. They're wrong all the time, and many of their loudest talking points turn out to be fads in retrospect. EG Monetarism seems to be dying ATM, despite having been unchallengeable for 40 years. That happens in physics too, but relativity didn't make Newtonian mechanics seem like pseudoscience in retrospect. To a MOP though, there isn't an obviously discernible difference between Newtonian mechanics and the food pyramid. Both are intellectualism, claiming the authority of science. All they see is suits, academic titles, and positions of authority who get to be the authority.

Anyway... because architect/artists speak can be bullshit, is often very clumsy, and we can't discern BS from insight, we assume it's all bullshit or a way to get away with bullshit. Often, its our own ignorance.

I credit PG with bridging these worlds for me.

Doom running on an HP printer is interesting because it is clever and because being clever was reason enough to do it.

This isn’t clever. It is a string of tech buzzwords washed with green buzzwords. Or to put it another way nobody really cares how their house is built. The PHP of construction materials and methods is just as good for just about everyone because what mostly matters is location.

The advantage of materials is the ability to stockpile. Their higher degree of asynchronisity. It is possible to maintain an inventory of prefabricated components.

An on-site machine has vast temporal dependencies. And the most common word in construction might be “delayed”...at least it can feel that way at times.

And no place is more full of surprises than what is underground.

The contrarian dynamic strikes again!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

There are better ways to build affordable housing already.

You make a factory that builds prefabricated panels then deliver them onsite. With prefab, you don’t need to transport an expensive piece of equipment to remote parts of the world and have onsite experts there to supervise and repair it. You don’t have to deal with tear down and setup of the equipment at every site and installers have predictable channels to install any power/ water infrastructure.

I suspect the reason this is popular is more because they are aesthetically pleasing and use new/ special technology than anything else.

There’s something cool in the idea of a community all building their own dwellings - even if it meant hiring a fancy machine to do the hard work while they all chipped to prep the ground the plumbing, fed the machine clay or whatever.

It’s not something you could measure on a spreadsheet but it’d be immensely cool to be a part of that, maybe even somewhere remote where you don’t really want to bring much more than absolutely necessary.

True, though you still need to transport all those panels to the site and assemble them - one interesting aspect here is that the materials are (mostly) present. That doesn't make for much savings of emissions for a single house, but if you built ten at once... I also wonder if you couldn't carve out a basement/cellar and use the dirt displaced to build the house over it, that'd provide storage.

>There are better ways to build affordable housing already.

Who'd think that a proof-of-concept doesn't yet compete with existing solutions?

>I suspect the reason this is popular is more because they are aesthetically pleasing

We are talking about places people can live in. Aesthetics matter.

The ability to produce something aesthetically pleasing on the cheap and at scale matters.

There is a reason Soviet architecture is the butt of so many jokes. They were rapidly building post-war, with the idea that those buildings will be replaced in two decades.

Many of those buildings are still there.

Consider what the Soviets replaced in terms of housing. The people who moved in weren’t giving up a dacha life.

Same holds for US housing projects. People came from cold water tenaments, share cropper shacks with an outhouse out back, and migrant farm labor camps.

They represent a huge improvement in shelter despite their lack of appeal to people of means

My point wasn't that it sucked; my point was that the architecture of ex-USSR countries is still dominated by that style even when the countries moved on.

So there's value in affordable housing with long-term aesthetics. It affects generations of people beyond those whose lives are immediately improved.

The first computers filled up an entire room and look where we are now...

This is a proof of concept and surely it will be refined to make more efficient construction processes.

> The first computers filled up an entire room and look where we are now...

So, in how many decades do you project that a house will cost $300, and will provide shelter for half-a-million people?

Why compare to computing, which is a discipline that's less to a century old, when you can compare to any other millenia-old-industry, some of which have seen revolutionary improvements, some of which have seen minor incremental improvements, and some of which have seen serious cost and/or quality regressions over that period of time?

This is besides the point, to the extent that it's not just wrong.

The goal here is obviously to build an experimental building, and isn't even explicitly related to affordable housing. Meanwhile, this building method produces a different building to the one you suggest. It's an irrelevant comparison for that reason alone, but there are lots. What if the factory is far away? The fact that transport needs are totally different is actually useful.

Also, what's with this static mindset? Don't you think there are no new building methods to be had?

Personally, I'm quite interested in these printed structures. They're not ready for major use yet, maybe they won't ever be. Practicability will (or won't) be proven when large projects are attempted. You need small projects first.

TLDR, of course they could have just parked an RV there. That's not the point.

From what I understand, prefab homes are only economical in remote areas, like if you want to give off the grid. If you just want a new regular house in the suburbs, traditional construction is going to be cheaper. To be clear, I'm talking about the US. China is successful with prefab, but they also have millions of people moving away from the countryside every year, so economies of scale work in their favor.

Lots of people in the US live in trailers and mobile homes. Cars too.

Not only are there better ways to build affordable housing, there are better ways to do exactly what the article is describing.

A buddhist monastery in my area managed to build beautiful structures using bricks made from local raw earth. No fancy giant 3D printers necessary.

Do you have have links for monastery? I have so many questions... how big is it? what does it look like? I love the idea of earth as a building material, and I'd love to see what the state of the art is now. Do we, as a species, possess the skill to build a Guastavino vault as good as a century ago in New York? Or something as pleasing Cuba's National Art Schools?

3d printing a building might be a cursed problem. If it doesn't scale past single-family dwellings, it's useless. Mo sprawl, mo problems. How could this tech scale up to the size of an apartment building? If you have a big crane, prefab panels are certainly cheaper and faster. Maybe if you built in the style of Agadez Mosque, with the scaffold incorporated into the structure, the robots could climb as they build. That seems to rule out toothpaste extrusion as a technique since the cure time would be a bottleneck. (Let's rule out energy intense curing agents.)

A bricklaying robot... supplied with bricks via the scaffold in the structure.... could the engineering to do that possibly be cost effective against skilled humans? Or the big crane? We haven't even considered aesthetics.

Cursed. Problem.

You are both right and wrong. Yes, experiments are good. Never will I disagree with that. However, it's the manner these experiments, proof of concepts and prototypes are presented.

If you go onto the various engineering and construction subreddits, along with subscribe to various construction trade magazines, these "experiments" pop up all the time. "New" methods. "New" materials. They're "new" if you've never seen them before. However, there's a good chance a real scientific approach to this was done half to a full decade earlier and abandoned for a good reason, which is never mentioned. Unrealistic, fanciful designs are great ways to hide the flaws and look cool because of uniqueness. Too many of these projects detract from more practical methods all in the name of, "We're out to save the world, throw money at us and question nothing!" Basically, think Theranos. Detracting from real, practical, truly well-meaning but unsexy projects is where I get angry.

There are 3D concrete printers out there. There's an Aussie one that escapes me that's just about commercially viable if it isn't already. There are plenty others, but the Aussie one was in the lead last I knew. Another company does an arm that can pick/place brick/blocks. While a bit slow, in like a 36 some odd hour non-stop cycle, it can build a regular, practical, normal, everyday, conventional 2 bed-room house. There are other solutions that are proven. Past experimentation. Past testing. Past prototyping. In production. Ready to go... except attention and investment is given to art projects. Which then hurts the image further for REAL projects because investors will immediately categorize them with these doomed to fail art projects. Remember, construction folks don't really care about form, it's all about function. Cost-effective, practical construction methodology for cost-effective, practical buildings that meet up to local building codes and requirements. Not art projects.

As a separate example of the silliness I'm describing: There's a really fun "innovative material" made from mycelium (fungus) that pops up as "brand new" every quarter. The main substrate does change every now and then, but generally it's a sawdust brick with a fungus allowed to spread into it and form chitin. This new magical brick is biodegradable and uses waste material... except no one likes to mention that they can only maintain ~40 PSI of compression while a standard cement block is rated for a minimum of 3,000 PSI. That's why it's always used in very artsy-fartsy designs to hide the limitations. Oh, and the one thing a building shouldn't be is "biodegradable". Also known as engineered-failure in about a 2 year timespan. We haven't even gotten to viability in windy, swampy, monsoon, seismic, freezing, high freeze/thaw cycles or any other special building conditions.

I so incredibly hate these art projects with a fiery passion because normies imagine, "This will help the poors". No, it won't.

So yes, in the end, negativity is warranted. It's a nice line of logic and experimentation... but earthen homes are a niche and 200 hours isn't that impressive (8+ days). A handful of people can build an impact earth home of the same size in a week by hand with no machinery. Just hand tools. This is on the scope of a cannon against a mosquito level of practicality.

Oh hell, you’ve got Chris Alexander’s shotcrete spayed on chicken wire all the way back in the 1960’s...it’s the methodology of A Pattern Language and the book has pictures.

The difference is that Alexander’s method was rooted in self-sufficiency. Do-it-yourself without an architect or contractor.