Architects are starting to 3D print buildings—and not in the way you’d expect

A couple of months ago, Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars announced that he was building a curvy, loopy and for some reason, largely see-through building, to be made with the help of Enrico Dinis D-Shape 3D printer. The project would cost up to 5 million euros ($6.4 million) and be completed in 2014.

Another group quickly piped up, declaring that a similar project they were working on would be done even faster and cheaper. London-based Softkill Design intends to fabricate a web-like building and whats more, it says it will need just three weeks to print the structureand only a single day to assemble it, which it plans to do at some point later this year.

This month, another Dutch company jumped into the fray. DUS Architects plans to use a 20-ft-tall 3D printer to build a house along an Amsterdam canal. Its also going to do it by the end of the year. Take that, Ruijssenaars.

3d house-printingit certainly sounds like a brilliant idea. Why bother hiring masons and carpenters and plumbers when you can buy a machine and print out your own abode? Goodbye, apartment blocks. Hello, homemade homes.

But what does this 3d house-printing actually mean? And if its so groovy, how com no one has done it yet?

First, the basics: Simply put, 3D printing works through a process of layering. The printer reads a file, much as a deskjet would read an image, and then translates that into a physical object the way your printer spits out ink on a pageone strip at a time.

The ink in a 3D printer is a materialoften plasticthat shoots out of a nozzle and onto a platform. If a printer is making a coffee mug, for instance, it will gradually layer up a ring until it reaches the top. You could call it a bottom-up process.

But you would never want to print a coffee mug, not even a silly one. For the moment, the cool thing about the technology is that its better suited to protoyping shapes rather that reproducing existing ones. Plus,gift shops the world over have shown us that novelty mugs are always a bad idea.

Say you were a design enthusiast, though, and wanted to make a chair in an unconventional form. With a 3D printer, that would cost the same to produce as the sort of vanilla chairs you pick up at Ikea. Thats because 3D printers dont constrain the imagination with mundane restrictions like molds, human labor or cost. If you can dream itand get a design for ityou can print it. It gives designers the freedom to imagine all sorts of kooky things in much the same way that advances in printing equipment freed graphic artists from the tyranny of movable type.

Things get tricky when it comes to large-scale projects, such as houses. The most obvious problem is one of scale. Just as you cannot print a billboard on a laserjet that can, at most, accept A3 sheets, you cant print a entire house on existing 3D printers.

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Architects are starting to 3D print buildings—and not in the way you’d expect