Mediaboss Marketing

The worlds most populous places are surrounded by shantytowns--especially those hard hit by disaster. How do we rebuild cities like Tacloban, destroyed when typhoon Haiyan swept through the Philippines? How do we provide affordable housing to repopulate the abandoned core of our own urban centers?

These arent new questions--there just never seems to be a satisfactory answer. For the last half of the 20th century, all kinds of modular designs were tried, but no one wanted to live in a leaky Bucky dome. Worse yet, the mass-produced modular homes of the 1950s were all exactly alike, leaving little room for adapting them to their environments. But what if you could 3-D print an entire house, and customize the open-source design to your liking?

This September, I joined Eric Schimelpfenig of SketchThis.NET at Maker Faire, New York to see the 3-D-printed house he helped design and build, and find out whether it really is viable.

--

Schimelpfenig knows more about 3-D modeling and kitchens than pretty much anyone on the planet. Hes worked with Google on Sketchups development, is a columnist for Kitchen & Bath Design News, and runs U.S. social media for high-end kitchen storage company, Kesseboehmer. He also founded and runs SketchThis.NET, which developed a premier kitchen design plug-in for SketchUp and provides SketchUp training for individuals and companies.

Its probably more accurate to say that Schimelpfenigs 3-D-printed houses, the Wikihouse, was assembled rather than built. The structure was engineered to be snapped together with fewer than 100 screws to hold it together. The modular wall sections snap into place and are movable, so rooms can be rearranged as easily as you might rearrange furniture. Even plumbing and electrical outlets can be rearranged within the open floor plan.

The entire project was designed in Sketchup, and this kind of flexibility is making Sketchup the de facto 3-D modeling software for architects, and in math and computer science programs at K-12 schools. A complete model of the house is free and open source, the Wikihouse Open Source Construction Kit. With a few thousand dollars for plywood, and a CNC milling system to cut out the structural forms, youre good to go.

I interviewed Eric after the event, and heres what he had to say about the project:

What possessed a bunch of computer nerds, none of whom had professional construction experience, to want to design and assemble a house in a couple of days?

The idea was to tell the story about how Sketchup can be used as an end-to-end design tool. This isn't a new story. We've been able to do this with software for many years now. What's unique about this project is that we utilized a totally new way to build a house. Typical wood-framed construction is easy to draw in Sketchup or other software, but it's hard to engineer it to be safe. This is why people go to architecture and engineering school. Building this way only allows a small group of people to be in control of the design process. Sure, you can hire an architect to design a house for you, but for many this is out of reach. With Wikihouse and Sketchup, design is now available to people that aren't formally trained in architecture or design.

Originally posted here:
An Open Source House That Bucky Fuller Would Love