From Italy, this hive-like house Is 3D printed, carbon-neutral, and can be made from local materials

From Singularity Hub:

3D printing homes was a really big deal a few years ago; the idea was novel, unprecedented, and crushed records for the cost and time it took to build a livable house. Now 3D printed homes, while not yet prosaic and still pretty wow-worthy, have certainly become more commonplace, with all sorts of variations: prototypes meant for Mars, two-story apartment buildings, entire communities; it seems there’s still plenty of space to play with the technology and plenty of innovation around new concepts to build with it.

One of those will soon be unveiled in northern Italy, and it boasts its own set of unique features to set it apart from its 3D printed predecessors. But calling it “futuristic” feels a little off, as some of those features seem like more of a throwback to the distant past, or an homage to nature and conservation.

The house goes by the acronym TECLA—short for “technology and clay”—which is appropriate given that this is what the structure is made of. It’s a collaboration between WASP, (which stands for World Advanced Savings Project), an Italian company that makes 3D printers, and Mario Cucinella Architects.

If you think it looks sort of like the giant nest or hive of some sort of winged insect, you’re spot-on; TECLA’s design is based on the hive of the potter wasp, a species of wasp found in the northern hemisphere that preys on caterpillars and whose hive is made of mud and shaped like a pot.

…According to the project’s creators, the house and its source materials are “adaptable to any climate and context.” WASP is even selling what it calls a Maker Economy Starter Kit; it consists of four 3D printers and a system for picking, mixing, and pumping local materials to print with. The company hopes its technology will be used to facilitate housing projects in remote areas.

Unlike other projects that use one printer on rails, this structure employs two printers working simultaneously. Printing a TECLA house takes 200 hours and uses 7,000 computer codes. The printed layers are 12 millimeters thick, and you need 350 of them total. The volume of “natural materials” required is listed as 60 cubic meters, and the energy consumed in the building process is a mere 6 kilowatts.

More here. And for more on 3D printing, a core component of cosmo-localism as a form of distributed manufacturing, see here on Dezeen’s page.