Creative Excursion #4
VBAT’s creatives head out again in search of inspiration and find themselves swept up in a construction revolution.
By Anthony Ford
Creative at VBAT
Building a house is no easy feat. Developing new materials and techniques to build a house from scratch is even harder. Designing and constructing an industrial size 3D printer to produce a real-size replica of an Amsterdam canal house using self-produced recycled material is nothing short of paradigm shifting.
On the industrial shores of Amsterdam North, under the inspirational shadow of Eye Film Museum, a team of renegades are busy building a new school of thought one 3D printed brick at a time. The 3D Print Canal House is a buzzing hub of innovation that aims to bring the world of 3D printing from the miniature to plus size. Our group of creatives from Amsterdam design firm VBAT were taken through the thought processes, techniques and machinery involved in the project.
With no fixed timeline or profit-hungry investors (they do have some silent partners and backers) the team at DUS Architects who are building the 3D Print Canal House are happily consumed in their project. Every element of the construction process is considered, re-considered, questioned, and deconstructed. The entire project is developing and changing with each arising challenge: The material isn’t weather-proof… let’s develop a new formula; The layers aren’t sticking…why don’t we try print on an angle?; The density is weak… Maybe add fibre? Our guide, Tosja, openly admits they haven’t got all the answers, they don’t know what will happen, but they’re 100% sure that they will, at some point, have a 3D printed canal house.
“Failures and faults can be melted down and reborn as successes”
It seems within the 3D printing world there are two camps; the boutique crafty bunch that welcome the deformities that the technique brings as unique wonders of production; and this new industry leaning sector that seeks the kind of regularity and reliability you’d expect of the construction industry. Either way, one of the great joys about 3D printing is the unending trial and error process where failures and faults can be melted down and reborn as successes.
It’s this lack of wastage that endears 3D printing to so many. But that’s only part of the story, it’s the ability to mimic the function of existing materials that is truly mind-blowing. Where before every layer of a house contained individual materials with unique functions here with 3D printing these elements are unified. Once this principal is understood the limitless possibilities of creation is frankly frightening. A bone, for example, with all its multi-functional parts; the spongey inner and dense outer, the vessels and joints, can also be reproduced by a 3D printer.
With its limitless possibilities of creation, lack of wastage, and pioneering belief of it’s early adopters, it seems in 3D printing we have the production technique of our age. A means of creation that could genuinely alter the course of industrial design, construction and society. To actually be amongst this bustling practice, at the avant-garde of a field of design, was indeed an inspiration experience.
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