Here’s a joke for you: what’s the difference between a kid scribbling with crayons and an architect?
A CAD degree!

An utterly impractical house

…by the standards of one part of the world for the last few centuries. Many people would find it much nicer and more useful than the little collection of rectangular boxes that we now call a house.

My bottom line: if we keep deluding ourselves into beliving that the replicator already exists, then nobody is gonna get the motivation to actually create one.

Honestly, every time some geek complains that “3D printing is not getting enough attention” I want to grab them by the collar and shout that they’ve got it all backwards. 3D printing has become the “go to” gimmick for anybody who wants to inject a few trendy buzzwords into their vanity project. 

Meanwhile, less gimmicky but more practical achievements – like the one Fang Xianfu is mentioning above – are getting less attention than they deserve because technophiles can’t project their juvenile fantasies of Star Trek replicators onto them quite as easily.

Architects To Print Large Shape.

Or possibly even ‘Architects To Print. Big Whoop.’

http://www.moillusions.com/2006/10/eschers-moebius-ring-with-ants.html

You can expect to get 10+ years from a caravan, but once the damp gets in between the walls, there’s not really a way of stopping or remedying it. They make all in one slot-in bathrooms in Japan, so the idea of a printed bathroom makes sense.

On the other hand, there’s plenty going on in the “printed house” arena already! Though I wouldn’t call it 3D printing, Facit Homes appeared on an episode of Grand Designs recently, showing off their process for actually making livable structures with CAD/CAM. 

They divide up the design for the house into a series of (not necessarily cuboid) boxes, which are then printed out in plywood using a CNC router delivered to site in a shipping container. The boxes are hammered together with mallets, and then hammered into the foundation with bigger mallets, then filled with insulation. There’s even a promo video on Vimeo, though I’ve not watched it so I can’t vouch for its interestingness; the Grand Designs episode was good though, if you can find it.

Considering that this 3D printed house is completely pie-in-the-sky, and the Facit houses can be bought and built today, I find that process much more interesting right now.