SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — A local non-profit that provides homes for the unsheltered now has a brand new piece of technology that will completely change the way they build homes moving forward.
In a story we first brought to you back in July, Eden Village has been gifted two 3-D printers which will allow them to build homes in less than a day.
Officials with Eden Village tell KOLR 10 they actually had to go pick up the 3-D concrete printers in Utah and spent more than 5 weeks training and learning how to properly build a home using cutting-edge technology.
“It’ll go in any pattern you tell it to go in and when it gets back to where it starts, it raises up a quarter of an inch or half an inch, whatever you need to get it up on the second layer, and just keeps doing that until it builds the whole house. when you get up 8 to 9 feet tall, it not only builds the outside walls, it’s building the inside walls as well,” said Guillory.
Brett Guillory with Eden Village says since returning from Utah, they have built 5 small test homes using the 3-D printer trying to iron out all the small details before they start building the third Eden Village.
Their next test will be printing a full 9-foot tall home and testing it to see if the walls will hold up in hurricane-like winds.
With the non-profit saving about 40% of costs with the new machinery, Guillory said this is an incredible opportunity.
“We got one guy running the pilot station and we’re just building this thing with three guys building concrete,” said Guillory.
A partnership between Drury and Eden Village is giving college students the opportunity to work on a project using 3-D printers.
Rachel Hoogland is a third-year architecture student at Drury and she says being able to get a behind-the-scenes look and use the 3-D concrete printers is something she is not taking for granted.
“I’m really grateful personally. I know everyone in the architecture department is super excited. we get to be some of the first students in the country who get to experience this technology,” said Hoogland.
Hoogland along with her classmates will be working on a hypothetical student housing project where they will look at the 3-D concrete printers and look to see how they can push its capabilities.
Traci Sooter is the director of the design-build program at Drury and she said students will try to come up with different ways to create new textures and techniques and do in-depth research that could hopefully change the entire industry.
Sooter understands the complexity of working with this cutting-edge technology but said her students will learn so much about the printers, that by the time her students graduate, they’ll already be ahead of the curb.
“We’ve already got architects from around the country, calling and wanting to be a part of this because they want to hire our students after they have gained this experience and this knowledge,” said Sooter.
