A man visits one of the ten 3D printed houses at the Qingpu Park of the Shanghai Zhangjiang High-tech Industrial Development Zone in Shanghai, China, 21 August 2014. A batch of ten 3D printed houses have been delivered at an industrial park in Shanghai and the buildings will be used as offices for local land relocation authorities. A private company in Shanghai used a giant printer set to print out the ten full-sized houses within just one day ealier this year. The stand-alone one-story houses in the Qingpu Park of the Shanghai Zhangjiang High-tech Industrial Development Zone look just like ordinary buildings. They were created using an intelligent printing array in east China's city of Suzhou. The array consists of four printers that are 10 meters wide and 6.6 meters high and use multi-directional automated sprays. The sprays emit a combination of cement and construction waste that is used to print building walls layer-by-layer. Ma Yihe, who is the inventor of the printers and has been designing 3D printers for 12 years, said the new technology is cost-effective and environmentally friendly. "To obtain natural stone, we have to employ miners, dig up blocks of stone and saw them into pieces. This badly damages the environment, " Ma said. "But with the 3D printing, we recycle mine tailings into usable materials. And we can print building with any digital design our customers bring us. It's fast and cheap, " he added.
