Courtesy of Will Baird, I learn that a company in China is breathlessly promoting its 3-D printed houses. A revolution! The future is here! Not robots, but the next best thing.
Or not. There are some numbers in the second link. At first you’ll see a claim of $4,800 for a 2,100 square foot house. That is ... hard to believe. It is also contradicted later on in the same article, where they claim a total construction cost of $161,000. So the $4,800 is probably the cost of the printed construction materials.
$4,800 is not a dramatic decrease in materials cost. In South Florida, your typical concrete construction costs about $6 per square foot of living space. (That is not the cost of the poured concrete; it’s the cost of the concrete needed for the walls in a house of that size.) That comes to about $12,000 in total. Now, $4,800 is less than $12,000, but it isn’t clear how much of that reduction is due to the technology and how much is due to other things. Consider that in California, concrete walls cost about $11 per square foot of interior space: almost twice their Floridian cost! Building codes matter a lot. I suspect that a Miami builder could halve their costs if they built to Shanghai standards.
The article reports a “total cost” of $161,000 further down, which is a far-from-revolutionary $74 per square foot. And it isn’t clear if that’s the total construction cost or just the cost of the printing materials when you make the correct all-in calculation, although given cheap labor in China I would guess the former.
I think this is either a publicity stunt or a marginal improvement. Maybe both.
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