Company in China 3D prints 10 houses in one day

3D printers are building some pretty amazing stuff lately: working speakers, wooden furniture,prosthetic limbs, and even foods like pizza and pasta — but WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. of Shanghai, China is thinking much, much bigger. Instead of pumping out small plastic parts with a desktop-sized printer, these guys print out prefabricated living structures out of concrete using a massive, building-sized 3D printing machine.

There’s a lot you can do with a 3-D printer. Now add “building a house in a day” to the list. Make that 10 houses. The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. (link in Chinese) has printed 10 homes in 24 hours out of recycled materials. This isn’t the first attempt at 3-D printing large structures in a short amount of time.Researchers in California are making a printer that can build a house in 24 hours. In Amsterdam earlier this month, construction of a 3D-printed house began. The house is made out of plastic bricks that fit together like Lego. It’s also being printed onsite. The Chinese houses, on the other hand, weren’t built onsite. They were printed in pieces and then put together in Shanghai’s Qingpu district.