Place your bets, when will Starbucks / A Company that uses this method start implementing AI to design the buildings and run the printers? The last part of the article they talk about how this was more expensive than normal, but it “addressed a labor shortage.” Motherfuckers will literally spend twice as much just to not pay a human a living wage.
Construction experts say the store is an example of an industry figuring out ways to use the technology.
“Experts say thing being used is example of thing being used.”
You wouldn’t download a Starbucks,…
🤔 there’s some jank on this print. Guess they’re just going to accept it.
I kind of think that if they’re going to do 3D printed structures, they’d do better to do buildings that can really play to the technology’s strengths: the ability to create fairly-arbitrary, organic shapes.
I mean, what they’ve got there is basically a rectangle with rounded corners. I guess the rounded corners are aesthetically unusual, but it doesn’t seem like it’s buying Starbucks a whole lot.
Starbucks clearly has been willing to set up custom locations using all kinds of architecture in the past:
https://www.klook.com/en-PH/blog/beautiful-starbucks-around-the-world/
Same thing with McDonalds:
https://www.businessinsider.com/weirdest-coolest-glamorous-mcdonalds-restaurants-in-the-world-2020-5
You’d think that if you’re going to use this exotic new construction technique that permits for a lot of unusual stuff, you could figure out a way to make some kind of eye-catching thing that leverages its strengths. Cost saving on construction is nice, sure, but…
The more complex the design, the more expensive it’s going to be, even with this construction method. Starbucks is looking to do this as cheaply as possible.
Complexity doesn’t really add difficulty to 3d printing. My 3D printer doesn’t much care whether a head is moving in a straight line or doing a zig-zag. It’s gonna just keep extruding that concrete.
Kinda like how a 2D printer doesn’t much care whether you’re printing a detailed image or a very simple one.
I guess that there’s a material cost. But, then, that’s also true of existing buildings, and they clearly don’t optimize for that to the exclusion of all else, else there’d be no aesthetic used in designing those buildings.
Just coming from a civil engineering/construction perspective, the straight lines are probably more about alignment. In these kinds of buildings (and considering US zoning laws that require a certain amount of parking), sometimes the alignment is critical to ensuring the building, parking, and drive-through fit. Straight lines are easy to measure, draw, and check in the field. Not to mention the actual way these 3D printing concrete machines work. The ones I’ve seen online are on some kind of track, and these ones are no different. From the looks of it, they’re kind of set up like those cranes you see at shipyards: https://youtube.com/shorts/igQ9G_Brkl8
I’m sure it’s a basic shape because the technology is in its infancy, and they wanted an actual building in the end. The fancy stuff comes later.
Yeah, I’m not an expert in construction but I don’t really know what this buys you vs using, for example, insulating concrete forms.
It’s outlined in the article, fwiw.
The benefit is not needing workers to do the construction
Clever use of the technology. I wonder if any other businesses are looking into this?
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They didn’t say in the article just how long it took to build. If you are in the area, did you notice about how long it took to actually put the thing together and get it open?
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Well, that’s unfortunate because they had the old building to get rid of. It would be cool to find out just how quickly it was able to be printed and everything so that we could figure out whether it would be shorter to print buildings that way. I would think it should be, but there’s an awfully large difference between should and reality.
Looks like a dark cave. It could use a few more windows.
I’m guessing that either (a) the method of concrete extrusion or (b) the process the particular company uses doesn’t permit for what I’ve generally heard in the plastic 3D printing world called “bridging” — being able to create some limited degree of overhang to create arches. If you look at the building, there are no arches — the places with windows are gaps reaching to the roof in the 3D printed wall.
Normally, with a brick building that has load-bearing walls, you can see a different pattern of bricks directly above a window, where the mason has to go out of their way to support the gap.
kagis
I think that that structure is called a lintel.
I’d think that one route to achieve that might be, during the printing process, sticking some kind of metal support above the window during the printing process, even if the extruded concrete alone doesn’t permit for it. But if they can’t do that as things stand, it’d explain why they might not want to have a lot of windows.
