An Italian architecture firm and a 3D printing company have collaborated to create the first 3D printed house made of earth.
The ecological building took only 200 hours to complete. It has a sturdy shape and curved walls that make it look like a kind of sea urchin.
Designing a place… On site
The interesting 3D printed house project was born from a “challenge” launched by the School of Sustainability: to design a sustainable house with natural materials on site.
Wasp, the main 3D printing company in Italy, e Mario Cucinella Architects they invented Tecla, which is short for “technology and clay”.
WASP is no stranger to these tests: in 2019 it used its Crane Wasp 3D printer to create a small house built using land and agricultural waste, but the team has been active since 2012. Futuroprossimo has followed. the first "serious" tests since 2015.
The 3D printed earth house
The team built the 60-square-meter (approximately 645-square-foot) prototype house with local land in a zero-waste construction process.
The building did not require the transport of any materials to the site, avoiding the environmental impact of transport. The 3-layer 350D printed house was built with 60 cubic meters of natural material.
“Tecla responds to the increasingly serious climate emergency, to the need for sustainable homes and to the great global problem of the housing emergency that will have to be addressed", states Mario Cucinella Architects.
The appeal of the 3D printed house: rustic and modern together
The "ferrous" material works on the perception of naturalness, the shape on that of modernity. It has the flavor of a more low-tech future.
The aesthetics of this house is the result of a technical and material effort. It's not just an aesthetic approach. It's an honest form, a sincere form.
Mario Cucinella Architects
In the 3D printed house the canonical windows are missing: in their place round skylights for large beams of light. Some furnishings are integrated into the construction, such as a counter and a bed. There's even a tree growing out of the center of the kitchen table.
“We like to think that Tecla is the beginning of a new story,” says Cucinella. “It would be truly extraordinary to shape the future by transforming this ancient material with the technologies we have available today.”
