Homes you can print transport on the back of a truck, even
fly. They sound like the homes of science fiction, but they might well be the
real residences of the not-too-distant future. Impelled by the pressures of
climate change and population growth and shaped by the promise of technologies
like 3D printing, a revolution is brewing in the future of home-building around
the globe.
We need to rethink almost everything about the way we live,
especially in coastal cities, because our world may be reshaped by rising
oceans in ways we can't yet fully anticipate, says Hans-Peter Plag, a professor
and director of the Mitigation and Adaptation Research Institute at Old
Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Complicating the problem of a shrinking landmass is the
prediction that the human population will bloom to almost 10 billion people by
2050.
Behrokh Khoshnevis, professor of engineering at the
University of Southern California and director of its Center for Rapid Automated
Fabrication Technologies, is one of many innovators looking to ease the housing
crises. He hopes his 3D printing construction method, which he calls Contour
Crafting, will create a way to build homes for a fraction of the current cost.
Khoshnevis said his technology would bu ild a house in a day and cut down the
construction cost by 30%, a goal he says will happen within the next year or
two.
Arthur Mamou-Mani, director of Mamou-Mani Architects and
Fab Pub as well as a lecturer at the University of Westminster, said 3D printers
and other fabrication machines “will empower people to participate in the
designs they want.“ He said some people have talked about how drones could pick
up and move houses in the future. “The house will be the drone. Why separate
the thing that carries you from the house? Just make it the house,“ he said,
adding, “Our generation is increasingly nomad, raised with low-cost airlines
and often working from home with laptops, therefore flying our homes will seem
normal in the future, and as for any migrating bird, borders between countries
will seem like an absurd relic of the past.“
Kasita, a company in Austin, Texas, is moving toward a model
that would allow people to move a home between cities without wheels or
propellers. Imagine owning a micro-movable apartment that you parked in a
building in Austin, where it slides in like a drawer. When you needed to move
to LA, a crane would come, put your house on a truck that would drive it to
your new location, where a forklift could slide it into an opening in your new
building.
No comments:
Post a Comment