Take a Glimpse at the (Ugly) Future With This 3D Printed House in Tongzhou

Could this be the beginning of an ugly house revolution? Lots of houses in the suburbs of Beijing follow the cookie cutter model home trend, but this is the first one built using a massive 3D printer.

The entire building process for this 400-square-meter home in Tongzhou lasted 45 days from start to finish and was made using melted filament to create a thin layers of material, and reinforced with concrete. The printer adds layer after layer, which hardens to create a solid object. Not too different from how you would 3D print any number of silly objects.

The hideous-looking chateau of sorts was built by Beijing-based firm Huashang Tengda, and the project required minimal input from manual workers, with technology specialists overseeing the majority of the process instead, The Mirror reported.

Unlike some homes that have been constructed using 3D printing technology in the past, this particular house is two stories and could withstand an 8.0 on the Richter scale magnitude earthquake. Some of the walls are more than two meters thick. Why walls need to be that thick is beyond us. Buckminster Fuller would probably throw up from the gross overuse of building materials used in the construction of this eyesore. On the other hand, his geodesic domes fell out of favor almost immediately after they were built in the 70s.

While these new technologically advanced methods will cut down on building costs, how much is a house worth if it looks like big steamy pile of dung, or a Fisher Price toy fort. This is a giant leap towards machines taking more jobs from human beings, but unfortunately it is also a dramatic step back in the world of design.

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Email: danielkippwhittaker@thebeijinger.com

Photos: mirror.co.uk