My neighbour Ian is a proper technophile. Whenever there’s a new product on the market, he’s the first one to get his hands on it. Each item’s arrival is announced with a knock on my door as he will be bursting to show off his new toy – and I’ll appreciate it, whatever it is.
One of his favourites to date has been a 3D printer, a miracle of modern engineering. It’s truly impressive tech, but there’s not a huge amount you can do with it. Ian did manage to make a replacement widget for me when my showerhead holder snapped off. The main limitation with the device, however, is the size of the printer itself; you can only make small stuff out of plastic. But I wonder what you could do with something much bigger – build a house perhaps?
That’s exactly what is happening at the experimental end of 3D printing. I came across a San Francisco based company called Apis Cor, who thought of an ingenious way of printing a fully functional 38m2 dwelling in 24 hours and for a cost of around £200 per m2.
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May 2018
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