Suzanne Humphries
Wasp, Italy’s leading 3D printing company, and Mario Cucinella Architects just finished building the first house to be 3D-printed from raw earth materials. The environmentally friendly and eco-sustainable process, called Tecla (short for technology and clay), only took 200 hours to complete.
The house has a unique look, designed to look like an organic cave. And while that may sound simple and perhaps even boring, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that it’s anything but. Cucinella, the architect, focused on “humane” architecture that blends low- and high-tech worlds, noting that “the aesthetics of this house are the result of a technical and material effort” and that “it was not an aesthetic approach only. It is an honest form, a sincere form.”
The 60-square meter house prototype involved a zero-waste construction process that only used local soil. It required no materials to be transported to the construction site, thus negating the harmful environmental impacts that come with transporting materials to a site.
Tecla is the centerpiece of a research project started by Cucinella and Wasp’s founder Massimo Moretti with the School of Sustainability, who were both working to find solutions for creating sustainable housing using on-site materials. Moretti studied the ways in which a building’s shape could control its efficiency in relation to its latitude and climate, along with how materials could impact ventilation and insulation while supporting structural balance across the building.
The interior of the prototype features a living space, kitchen, and bedroom, along with certain furnishings that are integrated into the structure itself. The house is made from 350 12mm layers and 60 cubic meters of raw earth with an average consumption of less than 6kW.
via It’s Nice That
