3D-printed buildings put into use in China

From a distance, these buildings may look like any regular brick structure, but close up you can see that their walls are made of hundreds of layers piled up together, as these are actually China’s first buildings made with 3D printing technology.

The ten grey coloured buildings have been erected in Shanghai without using a single piece of brick or tile. The wall bodies are made with a special mixture of carefully selected raw materials including sand, concrete and glass fibres, and they were printed out by 3D printers which were developed in East China.

The layers are approximately three centimetres thick but five times as hard as common construction materials.

“The building materials are all printed out by our 3D printers layer by layer and we pile them up. All the layers are firmly connected with each other. They won’t separate, neither will they deform and collapse.”

A number of workers have already moved into the buildings to use as their everyday offices.

Difficult words: pile (place things on top of another), erect (build), tile (flat square piece of baked clay), fibre (thin line of something).