Company Plans To Build House From 3D Printed Salt

Designers Emerging Objects plan to use salt from San Francisco Bay to create a building that mixes traditional and cutting-edge construction methods.

by Pierre Berthelot Kleck

June 25, 2014, 1:10pm

Most of us probably consume too much salt in our diet, but we've been doing it wrong—we shouldn't be eating this once precious commodity, we should be building with it. Design agency Emerging Objects, who specialize in 3D-printed architecture, have plans to 3D-print a house using salt from San Francisco Bay in their project 3D Printed House 1.0. The salt will be harvested from salt crystallisation ponds in Redwood City and turned into a salt polymer (salt mixed with glue) which is strong, waterproof and translucent.

The outside of the building will be clad in a cement polymer, which is both lightweight and strong, in a variegated pattern so light can pass through certain areas. Inside, private areas like dining room, bedrooms, and bathrooms will be created using tiled, two-storey vessels called Saltygloo (below), using a method which the company has experimented with before to create freestanding structures.

As the name suggests these take their inspiration from the Inuit Igloo and are dome-like structures that look a bit like giant, patterned lampshades. And they act a bit like them too. "The interior of the salt volumes capture light from skylights above," the company's website notes, "creating a series of glowing translucent rooms within the concrete box."

Saltygloo

The components, bricks, and tiles that will be used for the construction will be created using a 3D-printer farm rather than a huge 3D-printer which has often been the case in previous attempts at 3D-printed houses. The company has already produced full-scale prototypes of the 3D-printed rooms (above) and think that the entire building would take around a year to build.

While the design and technique might be new, constructing buildings from salt isn't—from the Palacio de Sal hotel on the Bolivian salt plains to centuries-old subterranean chapels carved into the Wieliczka Salt Mines of Poland, the 3D-Printed House 1.0 is continuing a long tradition of salty architecture.