Ireland 3D prints affordable housing project: ‘Completed 35% faster than with conventional methods’

by TraditionalAppeal23

20 comments

  4. Houses are expensive to build due to environmental regulations.

    Please consider the planet before complaining.

  5. What would really put this over the top is if the unit typology could be pre-approved by relevant planning bodies and local councils, so they could fast-track or even forego the planning process. Because as much as construction time is shortened, the biggest time component of delivering housing here is the planning process.

  6. This combined with AI will be the game charger in the world in next 30 years 

  7. Id like to see a good documentary about these things. What I’ve heard from an engineer who was involved in this kind of construction in Poland is that there are huge problems with the builds since the residents moved in.
    He says there is a reason you just hear how great and fast it is to 3d print houses, but you hear nothing else.
    Would love to see a project being followed and then visits to the houses after say a year and 2 years.
    They are probably much like the precast buildings slapped up years ago that are all a total disaster now.

  8. Very skeptics about this. Even if it’s true the end result isn’t great. If we actually want to fix the housing crisis and stop the endless sprawl we need to build apartments and we figured out how to build pre fab blocks cheaply and quickly 60 years ago. 3d printing just feels like a distraction

  9. This is good, but our key issue is a lack of dense accommodation in the right places destroying the country. Won’t complain but eyes on the prize!

  10. I’m a builder. This is total bullshit. It’s just simply faked data. It’s not cheaper when you account for the cost of the machines overtime to build the houses this way.

  11. Speed/blocklaying is not what’s holding us up here ffs…

  12. So faster built houses and even less jobs available to pay for said houses? Our real estate market is definitely something I guess…

  13. Have to say, if it’s anything like Lego it will last forever

  14. Isn’t this news like, a month old or something?

    Yea, it is. Press release from December 17th — [https://cobod.com/3d-printed-social-housing-project-compliant-with-new-standards/](https://cobod.com/3d-printed-social-housing-project-compliant-with-new-standards/) — and posted here two days later on the 19th — [https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/1hhpj9f/ireland_gets_worlds_first_printed_social_houses/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/1hhpj9f/ireland_gets_worlds_first_printed_social_houses/)

  17. I don’t trust the SCSI, but as a guideline [labour makes up between 40-50% of the cost of providing a home](https://scsi.ie/the-scsi-publishes-the-real-cost-of-new-housing-delivery-2023/).

    3D Printing may help, but only affects part of the labour costs – and isn’t going to make a dent in the crisis – and the biggest thing driving up labour costs, is the Housing Crisis itself and the difficulty of affording a home for those building houses (hence they need higher wages just to survive).

    To make housing affordable, you have to collapse the labour costs – _with those building the house still being able to afford accommodation_.

    Not easy. As a country, we also need to accept that Private Markets have completely failed for accommodation – and that we can’t resolve the crisis without the state directly building.

    I have only seen one plan proposed which covers all aspects of this, and that is to implement a [Job Guarantee](https://www.jobguarantee.org/), to tailor that towards building Housing, and to immediately provide accommodation to those in the JG building housing as the first priority, sourced from JG-built housing.

    These could be rented out affordably and stay in state hands like social housing, the JG workers would be paid a Living Wage (much lower than private sector wages, offset by much more affordable rent), and the JG would entice even high paid workers to take a break from their career and build housing, because the housing market is so fucked that the lower rent would quickly leave those workers far better off when they return to their career after e.g. 5 years.

    The entire thing would be self-financing as well from the rental returns, and/or can be run at-cost instead.

    When you think about it guys, the average number of man hours it takes to build a house is about 3,000 man hours – which for ONE person, is about 1.5 years working full time – and the costs for building _should_ normally average a third each for Labour/Land/Materials – so _in principle_, anyone who has worked for 4.5 years, shouldn’t have to be worrying about having a fucking roof over their heads – and _at the very least_, anyone who wants to _build_ affordable accommodation (including their own), should be trained/financed/facilitated by the state to do so – and not left victim to the rampant exploitation of the private sector housing construction and sales markets.

    If people could spend a mere 1.5 years of working to help build houses for the state in a Job Guarantee (preferably 3 or more) – taking a break from their career to do it – in return for _guaranteed_ affordable accommodation – then I think quite a lot of the country who are victims of this crisis, and most certainly the homeless, jobless, those stuck in a poverty trap renting, those being forced to emigrate, those who have _immigrated_ – would be very interested in doing this if the _full_ program were implemented.

  18. To be fair, build quality cannot be any shittier, so why not? 

  19. I’m more concerned about the quality of the construction. I’m from the US, and I work as a Landscape Architect. We’ve done some stuff like this for parks development and it’s some of the worst quality we’ve ever seen.

    Either the product simply fails, or degrades at a much more rapid pace than standard construction. We have had roundabout retention walls fail in the first frost this past year and a lot of the clauses protect the company from any liability.

    I understand for why they get protection, but it also feels like shit to have something you’ve designed for a year go down because there is no accountability to make sure things function the way they should. I’ll trust the product in 15 years when I can see some real world data.

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