Direct 3D printing for post-emergency settlements

We live in an era when the already precarious post-emergency housing conditions faced by millions of people have been dramatically transformed from something extraordinary into something ordinary. While waiting for reconstruction, everyday life is further complicated by the insufficient architectural and urban quality of temporary housing solutions (which last well beyond the emergency phase), while standardisation and indifference to context, be it cultural or environmental, generates alienating scenarios. This situation is an invitation to architects to restore housing to the centre of architecture, to reformulate the very idea of the residential unit and to imagine a new and diverse condition of dwelling. The time has come to reproposed multiple relations between private and public space offered by the design of a city, even temporary. Recent advancements in large-scale 3D printing technology and digital fabrication are bringing important innovations to this field of research. The particular nature of this technology lies in its capacity to establish a relationship between the ‘virtual world’ of parametric modelling (the level to which design can be personalised) and the ‘real world’ of construction (the potential to simplify realisation). By introducing new methods of construction that continue to bring construction closer to ‘production’, and design closer to product, 3D printing gives new meaning to the concepts of technical reproduction and seriality. It invites us to rethink the very approach to the design of architectural and urban space. Beginning with these considerations, this text reflects on and identifies limits and possibilities for the application of large scale 3D printing technologies for minimum, evolving and transitory housing. A design experiment is presented as an opportunity for a multidisciplinary, cross-scale and iterative investigation, verification and exploration of different thematic issues: prerequisites of spatial quality (flexibility of use, personalisation, expandability over time, versality of use and aggregation, etc.), logic and the reversibility of construction and strategies of intervention referred to the entire building process.