When Mark Wiesendanger saw a boat almost 8 meters (26 feet) long and weighing over 2,000 kilograms (4,409 pounds) that had been built by a 3D printer at the University of Maine, it sparked an idea: “If they could print a boat, could they possibly print a house?”
As the director of development at MaineHousing, a nonprofit housing finance authority, Wiesendanger helps fund affordable homes in the northeastern US state of Maine. He says Maine was in the midst of an acute housing shortage, with the state needing around 20,000 rental apartments for low-income households — due in part to a construction slowdown following the Great Recession the late 2000s.
So Wiesendanger decided to contact the person behind the boat-building project about the potential to create low-cost, sustainable houses with a 3D printer. Initially, Habib Dagher, the engineer behind the boat, was concerned about the limitations of the technology for printing 3D homes. Dagher, who is executive director of the Advanced Structures and Composites Center at the University of Maine, knew that producing a “more renewable, more recyclable and more flexible” home would require a new approach.