Documentary about inventor of giant 3D printer that can print a house

The Man Who Prints Houses is a documentary about Enrico Dini, an Italian roboticist who switched tracks to design and build enormous 3D printers capable of outputting houses:

Having built his printer – the world’s largest – from scratch, there’s no shortage of work offers for this highly-skilled and imaginative engineer. Throughout the course of the film, we see Enrico embark on an array of innovative projects: constructing the tallest printed sculpture in existence, working with Foster + Partners and the European Space Agency on a programme to colonise the moon, solidifying a sand dune in the desert, and printing the closest thing to an actual house: a small Italian dwelling known as a trullo.
The long-term nature of these projects and the current financial climate take their toll on Enrico and his team of workers, as contracts fail to be honoured and the infant technology stutters. Travel back to 2008 and it’s a different story, as Enrico describes how he was staring a €50m investment in the face. Just as he’s about to sell up and move to London, the stock market crashes… he must rebuild his business all over again.

The Man Who Prints Houses (Thanks, gaiapunk!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: 3d printing • documentary • Gadgets • happy mutants • italy • maker • movie • submitterator • video

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Marc45

Do these printed houses come with underwater mortgages too?
ahecht

A group at USC has been doing this since at least 2002.
- dinien
  
  May I see the materalized outcome then?
Lobster

I thought we could already print houses. My refrigerator came in one.
gaiapunk

Please be sure to support this awesome film via Flattr:
https://flattr.com/thing/417816/The-Man-Who-Prints-Houses
Roy Trumbull

Edison was there first. He made the first high quality Portland cement with consistent particle size. He invented a scheme to pour a house without voids and accommodate the plumbing and electrical. Some of these houses survive to this day.
- dinien
  
  Roy, we are talking about digital manufacturing. Edison applyed a 3D layering process, that is fine, but not using a computer.
katkins

I could have sworn I saw something on really large scale concrete printing in Germany… can’t find it now, but there are a lot of similar things going on out in the world…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/01/concrete_building_printers/

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/caterpillar-inc-funds-viterbi-print.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/16/business/realestate/main2487598.shtml

And there’s this in England:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfbhdZKPHro
- dinien
  
  Nice rendering. Also nice partitioning walls. But did already someone print a real house so far? I mean something like that?
Learethak

So… did anyone figure when the documentrary is going to be available? Trailer is nice, and whetted my appetite. However I did not glean any sort of “Coming Spring of 2012″ or similiar from the page.