Branch Technology, a Chattanooga 3D printing business, has chosen the winners of its $10,000 contest to design a 600- to 800-square-foot home to be built in Chattanooga using what Branch says is the world's largest free-form 3D printer, which is housed in Branch's facility in the Business Development Center in North Chattanooga.
The winner of the $8,000 first prize went to a WATG Urban Architecture Studio Chicago-based, four-person team for a design they called "Curve Appeal," a curvy, windswept-looking, single-family home with lots of floor-to-ceiling glass windows and outdoor breezeways.
"The team that worked on this thing, they are amazingly talented," said Platt Boyd, founder and CEO of Branch Technology. "They worked on the future tallest building in the world in Saudi Arabia."
"The group that designed this was just oozing with talent," said Melody Rees, Branch Technology's design and project manager who helped run the contest that drew some 1,300 entries from 97 countries. "This is just a nice house."
Branch will use its free-form printer — an industrial robot arm that extrudes pyramids of carbon fiber and plastic like toothpaste from a tube — to build the lightweight framing for the house that will then have spray foam and concrete slathered onto it to build the walls.
"Everything except the [frame] will be traditional building materials and methods," Boyd said.
The ability to easily create curvy, "organic" designs is what sets Branch Technology apart from traditional "stick-built" construction.
"One of the things we do really well is curvy walls," Rees said.
Now all Branch Technology needs to do is figure out the details, such as where in the Chattanooga area to build the house — and how to build it.
"No one has built a free-form 3D printed house — ever," Rees said.
She said Branch hopes to work in concert with local suppliers of concrete and other building materials to figure out how best to make the 3D construction technology work.
The other awards in the contest were a $1,000 Visionary Award given to a design called Home(less)+House by City College of New York and a $1,000 People's Choice Award for a design titled Urban Leaf by Spiru Haret University in Bucharest, Romania. A jury of five people from architectural, design and 3D printing firms helped choose the winners.
"It was a very hard decision," Rees said. "The work that we got in was incredible."
©2016 the Chattanooga Times/Free Press (Chattanooga, Tenn.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
