The first residential building in Europe, printed on a 3D printer, was occupied by residents

At the end of April, an elderly couple from Amsterdam moved to the vicinity of Eindhoven. This is hardly the news you would expect to see on the front pages of European newspapers. And yet, reports of this could be found almost everywhere-from the Guardian to TASS. 

The fact is that 70-year-old Eliza Lutz and 67-year-old Harry Dekkers celebrated the housewarming in a unique house — the first residential building printed on a 3D printer. 

The shape of the concrete structure resembles a huge boulder — these are easy to find in nature, but artificially their rounded shape is very difficult to reproduce. It was. So far, 3D construction has not appeared, which allows you to design and build houses even of a much more bizarre design. 

This house is the first of five houses planned by the construction firm Saint-Gobain Weber Beamix. The living area is 94 square meters. The architects were the participants of Project Milestone, a joint project of the Technical University of Eindhoven and the housing investment company Vesteda. The first printed houses were supposed to appear in 2019, but due to the complexities of architectural planning and modeling using the new technology, the start of the project had to be postponed.

The 3D printing method uses a huge robotic arm with a nozzle that feeds specially designed cement layer by layer to create a wall and increase its strength. Many in the construction industry see 3D printing as a way to cut costs and reduce environmental damage by reducing the amount of cement used.

The new house consists of 24 concrete elements that were printed layer by layer at the factory in Eindhoven in just 120 hours, and then delivered by truck to the construction site and placed on the foundation. Then the roof and window frames were installed and the finishing touches were applied.

For rent, the couple give 800 euros a month (about 70 thousand rubles), which is twice less than the average market for houses of this size. Interestingly, the key to the house was given to the couple not an ordinary one, but a digital one — in fact, this is an application on the phone that gives access to the house.