Habitat for Humanity recently announced that they have completed, in partnership with additive construction company Alquist, the first 3D-printed owner-occupied house in the world. I'm pretty sure that I've seen other 3D-printed homes kicking around, but this is still a big deal and one of the first of such homes for Habitat for Humanity. (It also 3D-printed a house in Arizona this year, but I guess that one wasn't owner-occupied.)

The 1,200 square foot three-bedroom home is located at 129 Forest Heights Road in Williamsburg, Virginia. And it was "printed" in just 22 hours, which Habitat and Alquist are claiming reduced their construction schedule by approximately weeks compared to a traditionally framed house. Overall, this translated into an estimated savings of 15% on the total construction costs. (Again, according to Habitat and Alquist.)

These kind of savings are particularly important in many rural communities where it is not uncommon for homes to sell below their replacement cost. Not surprisingly, when you have a market dynamic like this, there's zero incentivize to build new. I mean, why would you when you can just buy something that already exists for less money, and with less risk.

Alquist uses a patented concrete to print its homes. The concrete can be left exposed, or it can be finished with traditional building materials. For any load-bearing or structural walls, I understand that they print two walls with a cavity and then use typical reinforcing bars. I would imagine that this approach is particularly helpful when lumber costs are high, but there's an obvious question around embodied carbon (concrete in lieu of wood).

Still, it's hard not to believe that we will be seeing more, rather than less, 3D-printed homes in the future.

Last night as I was walking home, I came across the recently completed Yonge + Rich condominiums at Richmond and Victoria (I think they won awards for this name back in the day). I stopped to look up because I was curious about one particular detail -- the elbows.

This tower is, in effect, two towers that are attached in middle. And the differing facade treatments are meant to reinforce this: two towers, not one.

But because they are in fact connected, there are some unavoidable 90 degree angles in the floor plates. These spaces can be extremely tricky when it comes to laying out residential suites because they skew your ratio of square footage to vision glass. Usually you get too much of the former relative to the latter. You can also get awkward facing / privacy conditions.

And so these spaces are often referred to in the industry as the "elbow" suites or sometimes the "armpit" suites. Though I think elbows are a lot nicer than armpits.

Here's the Yonge + Rich example to illustrate what I'm talking about:

In this case, the entire stack is comprised of frosted translucent glass. So it is pretty clear that these spaces are not residential suites. Here's the floor plate:

What was done here was to make it circulation/corridor space. This solves the elbow suite problem and adds a nice feature to each floor. These days, very few corridors have natural light. Vision glass is too precious of a commodity. You could argue that it should have been clear glass, but presumably frosted glass was used to avoid privacy concerns.

The other trade-off that needs to be considered is that of efficiency. What is the ratio of saleable/rentable area to gross construction area? Adding circulation space lowers this number. So it can come down to whether it is better to have a higher efficiency with some elbows, or a lower efficiency with no elbows.

Every building is a prototype, isn't it?

The cost of container shipping continues to come to the forefront in this current environment. Today I was reviewing prices from a number of our suppliers and the rates for a FEU (forty-foot equivalent container) now seem to range anywhere from $8k to almost $18k (both CAD), depending on the origin.

This is up from a few thousand at the beginning of the year, and from far less prior to that. To help illustrate this point, above is a chart I found over at Statista showing an aggregated global container freight rate index from July 2019 to November 2021. This chart, which is in USDs, suggests that container rates may have peaked and be now tapering off, but who knows really.

This is a challenge for our suppliers and partners to manage through and it is a challenge for us to manage through. In some cases these additional costs will necessarily trickle down to the end consumers of the spaces that we and others are building. But in other cases that is not possible.

Habitat for Humanity recently announced that they have completed, in partnership with additive construction company Alquist, the first 3D-printed owner-occupied house in the world. I'm pretty sure that I've seen other 3D-printed homes kicking around, but this is still a big deal and one of the first of such homes for Habitat for Humanity. (It also 3D-printed a house in Arizona this year, but I guess that one wasn't owner-occupied.)

The 1,200 square foot three-bedroom home is located at 129 Forest Heights Road in Williamsburg, Virginia. And it was "printed" in just 22 hours, which Habitat and Alquist are claiming reduced their construction schedule by approximately weeks compared to a traditionally framed house. Overall, this translated into an estimated savings of 15% on the total construction costs. (Again, according to Habitat and Alquist.)

These kind of savings are particularly important in many rural communities where it is not uncommon for homes to sell below their replacement cost. Not surprisingly, when you have a market dynamic like this, there's zero incentivize to build new. I mean, why would you when you can just buy something that already exists for less money, and with less risk.

Alquist uses a patented concrete to print its homes. The concrete can be left exposed, or it can be finished with traditional building materials. For any load-bearing or structural walls, I understand that they print two walls with a cavity and then use typical reinforcing bars. I would imagine that this approach is particularly helpful when lumber costs are high, but there's an obvious question around embodied carbon (concrete in lieu of wood).

Still, it's hard not to believe that we will be seeing more, rather than less, 3D-printed homes in the future.

Last night as I was walking home, I came across the recently completed Yonge + Rich condominiums at Richmond and Victoria (I think they won awards for this name back in the day). I stopped to look up because I was curious about one particular detail -- the elbows.

This tower is, in effect, two towers that are attached in middle. And the differing facade treatments are meant to reinforce this: two towers, not one.

But because they are in fact connected, there are some unavoidable 90 degree angles in the floor plates. These spaces can be extremely tricky when it comes to laying out residential suites because they skew your ratio of square footage to vision glass. Usually you get too much of the former relative to the latter. You can also get awkward facing / privacy conditions.

And so these spaces are often referred to in the industry as the "elbow" suites or sometimes the "armpit" suites. Though I think elbows are a lot nicer than armpits.

Here's the Yonge + Rich example to illustrate what I'm talking about:

In this case, the entire stack is comprised of frosted translucent glass. So it is pretty clear that these spaces are not residential suites. Here's the floor plate:

What was done here was to make it circulation/corridor space. This solves the elbow suite problem and adds a nice feature to each floor. These days, very few corridors have natural light. Vision glass is too precious of a commodity. You could argue that it should have been clear glass, but presumably frosted glass was used to avoid privacy concerns.

The other trade-off that needs to be considered is that of efficiency. What is the ratio of saleable/rentable area to gross construction area? Adding circulation space lowers this number. So it can come down to whether it is better to have a higher efficiency with some elbows, or a lower efficiency with no elbows.

Every building is a prototype, isn't it?

The cost of container shipping continues to come to the forefront in this current environment. Today I was reviewing prices from a number of our suppliers and the rates for a FEU (forty-foot equivalent container) now seem to range anywhere from $8k to almost $18k (both CAD), depending on the origin.

This is up from a few thousand at the beginning of the year, and from far less prior to that. To help illustrate this point, above is a chart I found over at Statista showing an aggregated global container freight rate index from July 2019 to November 2021. This chart, which is in USDs, suggests that container rates may have peaked and be now tapering off, but who knows really.

This is a challenge for our suppliers and partners to manage through and it is a challenge for us to manage through. In some cases these additional costs will necessarily trickle down to the end consumers of the spaces that we and others are building. But in other cases that is not possible.