3D Printer Constructs 10 Buildings In One Day From Recycled Materials

What would you say if someone told you that future skyscrapers could be built using a 3D printer and recycled building materials? Well that day is not far off! With the capabilities to build the shell of a 2,000 sq. ft. house in under 20 hours, this new technology could provide a tremendous breakthrough in the future.

Computerworld.com

A Chinese company has become the first to construct multiple buildings using 3D printers that extrude recycled building materials at breakneck speed.

Using four huge 3D printers, Yingchuang New Materials Inc. was able to print the shells of 10 one-room structures in 24 hours and at a cost of only about $5,000 per building. The buildings had to harden at the factory and then be transported and assembled on site.

The 3D printed buildings will be used as offices at a Shanghai industrial park.

The printers, supplied by WinSun Decoration Design Engineering, are 20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long.

Like their desktop counterparts, the construction-grade WinSun 3D printers use a fused deposition modeling (FDM) technology to deposit materials one layer at a time in a process that's similar to squeezing frosting from a pastry bag.

To read the full article and watch a brief video, click here. 

One World Trade Center Officially U.S.’s Tallest Building

The One World Trade Center in New York will be the 3rd tallest building in the world upon completion. Look at what else this buildings.com article has to say about the new construction. 

Chicago’s Willis Tower can no longer lay claim to being the tallest building in the U.S.

Shannon, Flickr.com 

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat convened its Height Committee to rule on the official height of One World Trade Center (1WTC) in New York. The committee reached a consensus that the New York building’s height to its architectural top is 1,776 feet.

The two issues regarding the true height of the building were:

The nature of the mast structure on top of the tower.
The datum line (bottom point) from which the height to architectural top was determined.

Due to design changes that resulted in the removal of the architectural cladding around the mast at the top of the structure, it became unclear whether the structure was in fact a “spire” – a vertical element that completes the architectural expression of the building and is intended as permanent, or whether it was an antenna – a piece of functional-technical equipment that was subject to change.

To read more from this article, click here.

Start as You Mean to Go On

This is an excerpt from an article in the Facilities Management Journal.

No one has a better understanding how a building operates in its day-to-day life than the facilities manager (FM). The responsibility for even the smallest of operational elements results in a much greater understanding of economy, aesthetic and efficiency and how all of these impact on the end user. Now, with the advent of Building Information Modeling (BIM), the role of the FM in the design process is expected to increase.

BIM is a completely different approach to designing buildings. It analyses a building’s efficiency at all stages of the life cycle, treating it as a holistic entity. As such, different aspects can be added, changed or removed to alter performance levels before work even begins. This step change in every aspect of building design has meant a review of processes of how decisions are made and the people involved in making them.

Alongside this development, a recent report from Building Research Establishment (BRE) and the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM) looked at the results of a three-year study to increase the role and profile of FMs both in their organizations and relationships with other sector or industry professionals. One of the most interesting aspects, from the point of view of a partitioning company like Komfort is the setting out of the multiple benefits of involving FMs within initial design consultations and the common reasons they’re excluded from design processes.

The full article is available on the Facilities Management Journal website.