3D-printed home takes 48 hours to build 

In Texas, tucked behind a house for the wealthy, perhaps lies some hope for the significantly less so.

More than a billion people in the world go to sleep each night without reliable shelter.

But a pair of companies working on solving that believes their model of quickly 3D-printing a one-story house could not only provide merely a roof over the head, but a genuinely great place to live.

I took a walk around a demonstration house while at the South by Southwest technology festival in Austin this week.

It's a proof-of-concept built by Icon, a construction firm, and New Story, a non-profit that sets up housing in the developing world.

The 650-square feet (60 sq m) dwelling required about $10,000 (£7,000) of concrete, and took 48 hours.

Eventually the goal is to bring the cost down significantly by using a mixture of economies of scale - buy concrete in bulk - and improvements to the 3D-printing machine.

The goal build time is between 12 and 24 hours.

Later this year, the project will head to El Salvador to build some test homes, with the view to begin work on a community of 100 houses in 2019.

SOURCE: BBC NEWS
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