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Nowadays almost everything is being 3D printed, so why should architecture be an exception? Many architectural firms are adopting 3D printing as their preferred technique to build structures. And 3D printed architecture is slowly but surely gaining a lot of popularity and momentum. This emerging trend is paving a path for itself in modern architecture. And I mean, no wonder, it has a ton of benefits! It’s a simple, efficient, and innovative technique that lowers the risks of errors, and also manages to save on time. 3D printing eradicates a lot of tedious steps during the construction process and simplifies it. It is being used to build homes, habitats on Mars, and even floating islands! The potential and possibilities of 3D printing in architecture are endless and mind-blowing. We’ve curated a collection of 3D-printed architectural structures that are our absolute favorites – from 3D printed sustainable office pods to a 3D printed housing community for the homeless, every single one of these designs unleashes the magic and potential of 3D printing!

ICON 3D printed a 500 square foot structure which only took 27 hours of labor to construct. It will function as a welcome center at Austin’s Community First! Village – which will serve as affordable housing for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness. Six more 3D printed homes will be added to the development by ICON! The homes will be built using a proprietary concrete called Lavacrete, alongside the use of automated machinery and advanced software. The newly printed house features accents of black, white, and natural wood, creating a clean and minimal space that is aesthetic to live in!

Haus.me is a 3D printed luxury smart home that lets you live off-grid almost anywhere! The fully autonomous home is solar-powered and has been amped with an air-to-water generator which is hooked to a purification system, as well as a bioactive sewage system. The 400 square meter unit is prefabricated and comes equipped with smart systems, built-in furniture, and highly functional appliances. Though the price tag is slightly higher than usual 3D printed structures, but that’s because it’s being aimed at the luxury market. It’s a luxury vacation home you can set up anywhere!

Meet the Denizen Architype pod – a smart, functional, personal office that supports your remote work life and also could double up as a creative escape! This prefabricated office is designed with everything you need for the perfect workday and you can set it up anywhere in the world if you have subscribed to it – it’s like Netflix but for a physical office space. Denizen pods want to help reduce central office costs while adapting to the changes like remote work and flexible lifestyles. The 100 sqft pod is a modern solution with a small footprint that can help retain global talent, maximize productivity and reduce the environmental impact that big corporate offices have.

Designed by Dutch architects Houben & Van Mierlo, this boulder-shaped home in the Netherlands had its tenants move into it on 30th April, making it the first lived-in 3D printed house in the country! The single-story home was built as a part of a 3D printing scheme called Project Milestone. It is supposed to be the first 3D printed home in Europe where people actually reside! The tenants say the house has the feel of a bunker and feels safe. With curved sloped walls and floor-to-ceiling windows, the home is an open and warm living space.

DUS Architects created a 3D-printed tiny home in Amsterdam! Called the Urban Cabin, the little retreat is made of a bio-plastic, that has been crafted from linseed oil. This particular bio-plastic can be shredded and recycled into a new project, hence making the 3D printed home recyclable! It occupies only 90 square feet and is concrete-filled. A sculptural bathtub is placed alongside the home, and it is 3D printed as well. The super cute home is a true urban retreat, placed along a riverside, with an adorable bathtub to lounge about in. It’s a tiny home straight out of a fairytale!

TECLA  is a completely 3D printed global habitat based on natural materials. TECLA’s construction started as a prototype in 2019 near Bologna, Italy as a response to pressing societal issues of explosive population growth which inevitably led to a lack of affordable accommodation. TECLA is created using entirely reusable, recyclable materials taken from the local terrain – it aims to be a model for circular housing as well as eco-housing. The habitat has been designed by Mario Cucinella Architects and brought to life by WASP’s engineering and printing tech. TECLA is set to be the first house to be entirely 3D-printed using locally sourced clay which has been used for centuries in countries like India as a cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative to cement – clay is biodegradable and recyclable material that will make the building a zero-waste structure.

Mighty Buildings designed 3D printed homes that can be built with 95% fewer labor hours, and at twice the speed of a traditionl construction process. The company creates these prefab homes using their Big-G printer – a 20-foot tall 3D printer that functions at the speed of 120 millimeters per second. The structures have been constructed from Light Stone, a thermoset composite material (it hardens when exposed to UV light). The homes are quite stylish and elegant. They are usually around 700 square feet and equipped with a single bedroom, a kitchenette, a bath, and a walk-in closet.

DUS Architects built a 3D-printed canal house in Amsterdam! The components for the full-size canal house were printed on-site via a purpose-built printer called KamerMaker. The house was built alongside the Buiksloter-canal, acting as a research hub for 3D printed architecture. Each room in the canal house has been dedicated to a research theme. There is a ‘cook room’, wherein researchers will experiment with 3D printing with potato starch, whereas another room has been deemed ‘policy room’, where discussions regarding permits and how to obtain them, are carried out. Pretty cool, no?

In making R-IGLO, ArchiTech Company joined arms with Royal 3D to create igloo-like workspaces that are made from recycled PET plastic, a material that can be reused plenty of times over. Currently undergoing redevelopment, an important harbor in Rotterdam called M4H is where the team behind R-IGLO sources all the material used during the 3D printing process. Once the materials needed for printing are acquired, the construction of each R-IGLO workspace takes place in M4H as well. The R-IGLO units are built by linking together 3D-printed panels that can later be disassembled, stored, and transported just as easily as they were put together. Since each R-IGLO structure comprises several modules, owners can decrease or increase the size of their R-IGLO by swapping out different sized modules.

Designed as a series of modular islands that can transform any waterfront into a public space, Reeform aims at supporting life on land as well as underwater. A portmanteau of the words Reef and Form, the floating island comes with a two-part design. The upper half is designed as a hexagonal floating platform crafted entirely from recycled plastic, while the lower half bio-mimics the design of corals, using 3D printed concrete and calcite. As a result, both the upper and lower halves act as areas of interest for humans and marine life alike. Humans can use the modular platforms to create social spaces on water bodies like riverfronts, lakes, or pools, while the coral-inspired lower half helps reduce ocean acidification.

While laptops are lauded for their portability, their biggest caveat is that they often aren’t too ergonomic. You can either make a slim, lightweight, portable machine, or you can make one that’s ergonomically designed keeping human factors and proportions in mind. That notion, however, is being challenged by the NeckBook, a maverick laptop concept created by JooHyung Park, with an adjustable display.

The NeckBook, as its name should rather aptly suggest, is a laptop that has a display with a ‘neck’. Unlike conventional laptops that connect their displays directly to the base using a set of hinges, the NeckBook adds a sliding rail (or a neck) between them. Once you flip open your lid, as you would with any conventional laptop, the NeckBook lets you pull the display upwards, adjusting its height. The display slides up and down the neck, and can swivel left and right too, giving you an infinite amount of control over your viewing experience – something a regular laptop can’t.

The ability to adjust your laptop monitor’s height is an absolute game-changer, because laptops are notorious for causing neck strain over time. A desktop monitor often sits at a height, allowing you to keep your neck straight, while a laptop monitor sits much lower (since it’s attached to the keyboard) causing you to unnaturally bend your neck. NeckBook aims to eliminate this problem by giving the laptop a neck of its own. You can easily pull the display up to your eye level so you don’t need to bend your neck anymore, and when you’re done, slide the display back down and shut the laptop. At least on paper, it’s a remarkably useful feature that gives you the best of both worlds – portability and ergonomics.

Without getting too deep into the technical aspects of the design, what the NeckBook proposes is theoretically pretty easy to execute. Companies have experimented with swivel displays plenty of times in the past – if you remember the weird ‘convertible laptop’ phase around 2015 – albeit with little commercial success. My only real gripe with the NeckBook concept (apart from the fact that it’s not real) is that the laptop’s neck has been given what feels like too much prominence. The neck in this concept is a utilitarian detail, and highlighting it on the outside not only reduces the laptop’s smooth/sleek aesthetic, but it also imparts an industrial appearance to the laptop. A neck that sat flush against the laptop’s lid, or was concealed inside a potentially thicker lid, would probably really help seal the deal on this idea, which my currently deformed neck could really use right about now.

Designer: JooHyung Park

From Aisles, her EP of ’80s covers, Angel Olsen’s version of Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face” (from his 1983 album Rebel Yell) turns the already brooding ballad into a dark, spacey dirge. While it’s dramatic, Olsen’s version of the tune feels softer (partly because she removed Idol’s sing-rap and replaces it with a muffled spoken-word) but remains mostly faithful to the original.

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is master planning a city called Telosa for entrepreneur Marc Lore, which is set to be built “from scratch” in the US desert.

Announced on Twitter by Ingels’ architecture studio BIG, Telosa would be built on an unoccupied 150,000-acre site in the western United States.

“Our vision is to create a new city in America that sets a global standard for urban living, expands human potential and becomes a blueprint for future generations,” said a statement from Telosa.

The city is the idea of Lore, an entrepreneur and former CEO of e-commerce at retailer Walmart, who sold his start-up website Jet.com to the supermarket giant for $3.3 billion in 2016.

Lore’s idea is to acquire a large plot of land that would be donated to a community endowment so that its increasing value could fund the city’s development and improve the resident’s welfare.

Telosa to be built on community-owned land

“There’s a finite amount of land and that land was claimed generations ago – communities were created, tax dollars were used to invest in the land, and therefore the land increased in value over time with landowners not having to produce anything or take any risk,” explains Lore on the Telosa website.

“Land could essentially go from a barren piece of desert to a modern-day city worth billions, or even trillions,” he continued.

“It got me asking even more questions and thinking about a potential solution. What if that land had been owned by a community endowment?”

Envisioned to grow to a population of five million over the next 40 years, the organisers are aiming to create a city for 50,000 people by 2030.

Aim is to be “the most sustainable city in the world”

Broadly based on the principles of urbanist Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities in the UK, the city would have a density of around 33 people per acre – broadly equivalent to that of San Francisco.

According to Lore, building Telosa from scratch would allow it to become “the most sustainable city in the world”.

“My focus turned to making Telosa the most sustainable city in the world,” he explained. “From global warming to water and energy – how can we do better for future generations? And what technology and other innovations in policy and design can we embed in the city that is only possible because of the fact that we’re building it from scratch?”

“Just imagine what’s possible with sustainable building materials, autonomous vehicles, electric aircraft, and underground movement of materials.”

Viewing tower to stand at centre of city

The city would contain “diverse housing options” that “are accessible to all”. An image of BIG’s Dortheavej Residence in Copenhagen was used to illustrate the section on Telosa’s website.

A large viewing tower dubbed Equitism would be built at the centre, which would be surrounded by a series of blocky high-rises.

“Rising from the lush central park of Telosa, Equitism tower is a beacon for the City,” explained the Telosa website.

“The inviting civic and lookout areas bring visitors and residents together. A photovoltaic roof, elevated water storage, and aeroponic farms enable the structure to share and distribute all it produces.”

Ingels is the founder of BIG, one of the world’s most successful architecture studios. He recently launched a home design company that aims to “reimagine the way we build our homes”.

He is also drawing up a master plan for the whole planet to “prove that a sustainable human presence on planet Earth is attainable with existing technologies”.

Renders courtesy of BIG.

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American practice Studio Upwall Architects has designed a house on a desert site in Moab, Utah, sheltered from the harsh climate by a weathering steel roof.

Overlooking panoramic views of red rock cliffs, the rusted steel and weathered wood cladding of Sunny Acres Residence was chosen by the Washington-based practice to reference the colour palette and texture of its surroundings.

The simple arrangement of the 185-square-metre home sees bedrooms and utility spaces in its northern half, and a large living, kitchen and dining area facing south, protected from the sun by the metal roof’s large overhang.

“The home is simple in function and form with an asymmetric gable roof volume that is extruded along the main axis of the house to form an exterior shroud,” said Studio Upwall Architects.

“The southern wall, punctuated with a series of glass doors and windows designed to provide a connection to the landscape and panoramic views, is set in under the deep overhang of the roof to deliver shade in the hottest months.”

This overhanging roof form continues downwards with two wall sections, one solid and one fitted with louvres, at either end of the roof to further shade the large windows.

Extending from the interior, the smooth concrete floor creates a patio that wraps around the southern end of the home, with outdoor seating areas oriented towards the La Sal Mountains and sunrise to the east, and sunset over the Utah Cliffs to the west.

Grey render covers the exterior, with openings surrounded by weathered wood cladding to creating a softer texture where the home is entered. A sliding, slatted door on the eastern elevation enables further control of the sunlight.

Inside, white walls and a pitched ceiling brings a feeling of lightness and space, with simple fittings focusing attention on the framed views of the landscape.

A ladder leads up to a mezzanine loft above the kitchen area, creating a more intimate space for reading and reflection away from the brightness and open views of the ground floor.

Along the northern edge, the roof extends down to provide greater privacy in the bedroom and bathroom spaces, which feature smaller horizontal windows.

Opposite, a small garage building has been designed with the same form and weathered exterior finishes to mirror the main home.

Other projects recently completed in Utah include a charred wood home by Klima Architecture and a cedar-clad courtyard home by Kipp Edick and Joe Sadoski, both located close to the Wasatch Mountains.

The photography is by City Home Collective.

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