World’s First 3-D Printed Building Planned by Dutch Architect to come up by 2014

The Dutch architect, Janjaap Ruijssenaars in the fourth week of January 2013 unveiled his plans to design the first 3D-printed house of the world. The Landscape House will appear as a continuous looping Möbius strip that rises from the ground and then folds back in seamless rolling band. However, the intricate geometry of the planned building is not crafted from concrete, but from the layers of printed sand.

Janjaap Ruijssenaars is at present, working with the mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs for creating this building in sections of up to 6x9m, which are printed with the help of D-Shape printer. The special D-Shape printer is developed by the Italian engineer Enrico Dini and it makes use of the stereolithography principles just like the small printers. The only difference is that this D-Shape printer is scaled up and uses the sand fused together with the help of chemical binding agent.

The sections of the building will be printed like the hollow shells and later they will be filled with the fibre-reinforced concrete in order to imbibe it with the extra strength. The special, first-of-its-kind 3D printed building will take an estimated time of 18 months, which means that it will be available in 2014. The cost of constructing this building is estimated to be €4-5m (£3.3-£4.2m).

Earlier, the largest ever 3D-printed object was created by the Italian architect Andrea Morgante of Shiro Studio. This architect made use of the same printer in order to fabricate the 3m-high pavilion in 2009.