California-based Azure Printed Homes has announced intentions to construct 14 prefabricated 3D printed homes using recycled plastic. The homes will form part of a new housing development in Ridgecrest, California, led by Oasis Development.
The project will build on Azure’s existing production of backyard studios and ADUs, which it produces from its factory in Culver City, CA. The company claims that 3D printing their ADUs and studios from recycled plastic allows them to build the units 70% faster and with 30% fewer costs than traditional home construction methods.
“We have created production efficiencies not only by capitalizing on the advances in 3D printing but by creating a design and process that is completed in only 12 hours,” says Ross Maguire, a co-founder of Azure. “When compared with conventional construction, we produce the entire structural skeleton, the exterior sheathing, the water control barrier, the exterior finish, the passageways for utilities, and the grounding for interior finishes in a fraction of the time and cost.”
Azure is currently taking pre-orders for ADUs and studios and is expected to deliver the fourteen homes for Oasis’ Ridgecrest development in September 2022.
The project is the latest in a series of recent developments in the 3D printed architecture space. In Virginia, Habitat for Humanity has recently announced the completion of its first 3D printed home in the United States, while the company’s 3D printed housing project in Tempe, Arizona was the subject of a recent Archinect feature which took a deep-dive into the process of designing and constructing a 3D printed house.
Elsewhere, BIG and ICON have teamed up to deliver a 100-home neighborhood using 3D printed methods in Austin, Texas, while the world’s first 3D printed raw earth house was showcased at COP26 in October of last year.
8 Comments
Might I suggest a slogan for your ad campaign?
"ADUs for people who don't give a shit."
How does your comment qualify as useful or funny? Hint: It doesn’t.
Pot, meet kettle.
Would love to some details of the envelope. IIRC, Katerra faced a lot of material and waterproofing issues during their brief run as the would-be kings of prefab tech.
Please!!! No plastic in any form! It is killing us quietly and unnoticeably because of its convenience. Look at the science.
This is proposing using existing, recycled plastic. It's not creating new plastics.
Oh, I get that. IT is plastic and it never disintegrates totally (never) and some day it will BE discarded and it is very big and very permanent!!! It is not a natural material that is truly sustainable. Recycled plastic is still plastic and I highly doubt it is 100% recycled plastic at that--it may be only 10% if not less. I see sales pitch written all over it! Plastics need to go away.
So do you believe that plastic currently in our environment should be left in landfills or oceans rather than reused for something useful? We believe that we should try to eliminate single-use plastics, and plastics in general, but for the plastic that has already polluted the earth do you not think it is beneficial to make productive use out of it?
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