Atlas City Project

www.contourcrafting.org/

That stuff is great.

I'm not sure how well that would work on a large scale with heavy materials having a tendancy to slop all over the place.

I quite like the idea of a giant mould for creating house parts and houses in a factory setting. (spherical or cylindrical, for example, as then they could be rolled along the road for transport purposes, and the spherical design would allow for future adjustment to maintain a level building should the ground change.)

But the contour stuff does interest me, though I'm less keen on burying stuff inside walls!

there is a start-up in Spain, with HQ in London that has built a very large one of these.
But its seems many years away from being used in anger.

I think robotic building is better used at smaller scales for high quantity things that are all the same.
I.E: Components of high net energy / monetary value.

At the larger scale you have to eventually bring those components together.

SO i also prefer the factory automation of the parts of the building, and i also agree with Nanos that giant moulds is the current way to go.
This is already done for apartment buildings and houses. Just like Prec cast sandwich panel concrete and hollow core slabs. Its 30 year old tech and works fine.

But concrete has a very high emobied energy, so its a long terms issues.

Hemp crete can be used to replce concrete but it is NOT load bearing, so a superstructure other than the armature is needed. SO wood or steels.

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There is of course another way to do this and that is to use curved iglo style buildings. They have serious advantages:
1. The roof and walls are the same. SO you get a massive reduction in components and complexity
2. Because its curves the modulas of elasticity is not longer an issue. Curved shell type building are much stronger, and so we could use hemp crete with a small concrete mix with it.
These could then be lifted onto site, and also merged with other primary structure.
The onyl down side of the spherical 7 curved building is the interfacing of them with other things. Its hard to do. But if the design is truely monolithic than it does not matter

I see great opportunities for pre-cast monolithic construction !!!

I spoke with Berok Boshknevis who runs Contour Crafting, and he was very optimistic in the idea of an example RBE city, offering his help in anyway.

As far as costs, he said the procedure would be 1/4 that of labor construction, which would place it at $20 per square foot (labor construction is approx $80)

As far as large structures contour crafting is able to automatically insert metal fraiming among other techniques.

As far as plumbing etc, placements within the wall can allow access for repairs.

Regarding time, it could be 100 times faster than human labor, completing one house in a day.

I think we could easily design buildings to incorporate automation/cybernetics with contour crafting in mind.

That's great that they may be supporting of this proof-of-concept idea. I'm glad you could get so definitive numbers for construction as well. Good work!

wow thanks for contacting him. that actually looks really cool and efficient.

Eggsworth wrote:


Almost no waste, as compared to modern construction which produces insane amounts of waste. We should work on a draft of schematics to present to Berok, he can then tell us how we can adapt it to Contour crafting, while maintaining our goals too. I honestly see this as the best route towards an example city, as it fits all of our tenets regarding automation, efficiency, and Berok is more than excited about our project, which could link us with the University of Southern California.

Some is in Conceptualization Committee "Atlas Building 2.0" and "Atlas Residential Building"