The slab has been laid, a frame is being printed and cement piping that looks like soft serve is poured by robotic crane
In a quiet street in the city of Wyndham, in Melbourne’s outer western suburbs, a house is being built. The slab has been laid, the frame is being printed.
Almost silently, cement piping that looks like soft-serve ice-cream is methodically poured by a giant robotic crane.
This will be Australia’s first 3D-printed multi-storey house.
“I’m going to live in it personally,” says Ahmed Mahil, the CEO of Luyten, the Melbourne-based company that is printing the house.
“I’m not just selling it to people, I actually trust the science behind it.”
At the heart of Australia’s housing crisis lies a central issue: there are not enough homes. Also, over the past 15 years, we’ve become slower at building them.
The average build time for standalone houses has slid from nine months to 12.7 months (a 40% increase), while apartment construction timelines have blown out from 18.5 months to 33.3 months, Master Builders Association data shows.
Mahil says he is about to move into the answer to that problem.
Melbourne 3D house construction interactive
3D printing shaves huge chunks of months off a build. Mahil’s house, which will have four bedrooms and five toilets, will be completed within five weeks.
“The printing itself is about three weeks, and then to put the roof and the lighting and all the other services, that will take us about five weeks,” he says. “Then I can move and live inside it.”
While there has been no Australian research into the cost differences between traditional brick and mortar builds and 3D ones, Mahil says he got comparative quotes for his house.
“I have three quotations, and the best of them, [3D printing] comes cheaper at 25% to 30% [than traditional builds],” he says. Mahil did not tell Guardian Australia how much it is costing to print his home.
Australia’s first 3D-printed home – a one-bedroom in New South Wales that was completed in May 2023, took just two days to construct. Overseas, entire suburbs are being printed and built. Last year, in Wolf Ranch, a suburb in Georgetown, Texas, 100 homes were printed.
Melbourne 3D house construction interactive
Governments are warming to the idea.
In NSW, the Dubbo 3D-printed social housing project – two modern two-bedroom duplexes – is about to be completed. Starting late last year, it took about two weeks to finish construction of all internal and external walls. Indigenous tenants are expected to move in to the building by the end of March.
Guardian Australia understands the Dubbo project will cost the government $814,000, and is estimated to cost 10-20% less than a traditional build.
The NSW housing minister, Rose Jackson, says her government opted for 3D printing because it wants to deliver more houses, more quickly. She calls 3D-printed houses “a gamechanger”.
“It’s faster to construct, cheaper to build, and more environmentally-friendly than traditional construction methods because it cuts down on material waste,” she says.
There are also lower environmental impacts. Two weeks ago, a study published in the Journal of Building Engineering, looking at the environmental impact of a build in Canada, found the technology has the potential “to support sustainable and efficient construction, particularly in remote locations”. “However, material consumption and transportation remain significant contributors to environmental impact,” it said.
Property developer Kavitha Vipulananda is now completing her PhD in housing at the University of Melbourne. She says there are environmental benefits with 3D-printing homes – but other issues are also in play.
3D printing homes in urban environments and the middle ring suburbs that sit just outside the CBD and inner-city neighbourhoods is “a bit tricky”, Vipulananda says, pointing to the size and manoeuvrability of the 3D printer. “You can only really do houses at the moment.”
Banks are also reluctant, for now, to fund developers to 3D print homes because it is a new technology, she says. Prospective customers are also limited in the design options to choose from. “It just needs to be more flexible on sites and more flexible for consumers.”
Michael Fotheringham, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute managing director, says 3D printing could help the federal government meet its target of 1.2m homes in five years, but there are a lot of unknowns.
“We’re really early days with this stuff in terms of actually delivering housing,” Fotheringham says. “I think we’re really more at a demonstrating potential than delivering in any mainstream sense.”
Fotheringham says more research is needed on the insulation and energy efficacy of the builds.
“We need to make sure that we’re building housing that is suitable for our climate … and energy efficient going forward,” he says.
While alternate building strategies are worth exploring, Fotheringham says governments should concentrate on more high-density housing close to the CBD.
“3D printing probably plays a role in that infield development quite effectively,” he says, “because of its pace of delivery, it’s less disruption to communities.”