The Science (Fiction) of Real Estate

It’s been more than 50 years (50 years!) since the Jetsons, and thanks to them we all thought we’d be flying around in our bubbly little coupes by now. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. Whatever the real estate equivalent of the flying car is, we don’t seem to be living in them either. There have certainly been advancements, but aside from a few trends, today’s homes and condos are essentially as they have been for decades.

Over the next few years, though, we may just start to see some substantial differences in the esthetics, materials and marketing used in the building industry, all thanks to the miracle of 3D printing. I’m not sure we’ll be airborne, but it’ll sure give us something to talk about.

Look just a few years down the road, and I predict a consumer will walk into a furniture showroom, pick out a look they like, scan it on their phones, add in the dimensions of their suite, and get a custom-printed piece of furniture that conforms to the specific space in which they want to put it, even following the curve of an interior wall, in exactly the colour and pattern they want. For builders, it’s nothing short of a revolution. Not only can they save on materials and enormous amounts of time — the Chinese company WinSun has already built 10 homes in 24 hours using 3D printers — but for them it’s a marketing revolution too. One of the difficulties in selling pre-construction is the lack of tangible materials to show potential buyers. Now imagine they could quickly and efficiently erect full-scale perfect 3D models of a number of floorplans, at a fraction of the cost and time it takes to build a model suite today.

But that’s the least of it.

In a recent TED talk, Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and the Director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California, provided a jaw-dropping look at the real potential of 3D printing.

With nearly one billion people worldwide living in slums that breed disease, crime and illiteracy, even good, caring governments have trouble coming up with viable solutions. Conventional construction is slow, labour-intensive, expensive and potentially hazardous (Khoshnevis says it’s more dangerous for its participants than mining and agriculture), which all translates into increased costs to society, and to homeowners. He has created a system called Contour Crafting, which uses lessons taken from CAD/CAM (computer aided design/computer aided manufacturing), in which structures designed on computers are sent to production machinery that automatically makes a product, only using 3D printing, he ramps it up to building scale. In this way, it’s possible to build entire neighbourhoods in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional building. It also offers architectural flexibility, so that the neighbourhoods don’t have to comprise identical ticky tacky boxes.

Via contourcrafting.org

In the Contour Crafting system, concrete is deposited through a nozzle from an enormous printer, so that the structure is built layer by layer. The process can make reinforcements automatically — it can even perform automatic insertion and assemblage of sections of rebar inside the structure — as well as install plumbing and electrical; automated processes can also do the finishing work, such as tiling and even painting.

In the end, an entire 2,500-sq.-ft. home can be built in about 20 hours, and that’s custom-designed. Walls don’t have to be rectilinear — the process can execute exotic, beautiful architectural features at no extra cost.

For mass consumption, since ours is essentially a real estate-based economy, it could certainly have terrifying consequences for the job market. But what might it do for the spirit to have a home of one’s own, particularly in developing nations? It would be nice to think entrepreneurship would take a foothold if the mundane but enormously important need for shelter were taken care of.

This industry is my passion, so the implications of 3D printing on it are of particular interest, but outside the sector the potential is mind-blowing. It was announced just this week that doctors are now printing blood vessels using bio materials. Bio-printing companies have been successfully keeping 3D printed human tissue alive for a year, with one company saying in December that they expected to have a printed liver ready next year.

Wrap your brain around that one, particularly if you grew up in an era when television was a miracle.

It may make the 3D printing applications of the building industry seem petty by comparison but imagine if we start keeping people alive and independent even longer — we’re going to need places to put them!