Everything is printed nowadays, everything! Dentists print dental fillings, car manufacturers print car parts, artists print (often quite ugly) art. Two years ago, an Israeli bioprinting company printed a 104 gram steak from muscle and fat cells they had grown themselves – delicious.
There are also hardly any limits to the dimensions of the printer: in 2018 a Belgian company printed a mammoth skeleton, American colleagues printed a caravan – and in 2022 the first 3D-printed house in Germany was finally in Beckum in North Rhine-Westphalia completed.
But while that building was still more expensive than, say, a conventional solid house, a project in Kenya is now showing that in the not too distant future affordable apartments could also come out of the printer: A Swiss company for sustainable construction is printing in there community of Kilifi together with a UK development and cooperation organisation a settlement of 52 single-family houses. The construction printer lays concrete layer on concrete layer, so the houses are basically built up like these little bowls that are made in school using the beading technique.
Soon entire cities will be printed in the landscape based on the Kenyan model. This would also have the advantage that the almost proverbially ugly works of art that stand in the center of roundabouts could be replaced by masterpieces. Simply program the Venus de Milo or Michelangelo’s David into the printer and there are no longer any limits to the beauty of the printed world.
Read previous episodes of the column here. You can find more good news here.