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A DUTCH ARCHITECT has designed a house “with no beginning or end” to be built using the world’s largest 3D printer, harnessing technology that may one day be used to print houses on the moon.
Janjaap Ruijssenaars, 39, of Universe Architecture in Amsterdam, wants to print a Mobius strip-shaped building with around 1,100 square metres (12,000 square feet) of floor space using the massive D-Shape printer.
The printer, designed by Italian Enrico Dini, can print up to almost a six-metre-by-six-metre square (20-foot-by-20-foot), using a computer to add layers 5-10 mm (a quarter to half an inch) thick.
Ruijssenaars says the building could serve as a home or a museum and would have parts usually made from concrete printed using broken up rocks and an emulsion binding, while steel and glass would provide the facade.
“It’s our ambition to have the first printed house, this printer has made art or objects for sea defences, but this is the first time to build something that can be lived in,” he told AFP.
Ruijssenaars said the plan was not initially to print the building but the hi-tech medium turned out to be the most appropriate.
“We started to ask the question if a building can be like the landscape, in order to make a building that would not harm the landscape, or at least learn from the landscape,” he said.
“We analysed that the essence of landscape is that it has no beginning or ending, so it’s continuous, not only the fact the world is round but also water goes into land, valleys into mountains, it’s always continuous.”
The Mobius-strip shaped result bears a striking resemblance to the art of another Dutchman, 20th-century designer and illustrator M C Escher.
“In this design he’s definitely been an inspiration, I would say he’s the king of Mobius strips in drawing,” Ruijssenaars said.
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When trying to make a small model of the building, Ruijssenaars realised that whatever material you use, from paper to lead, “you have to make a strip and then bend it in order to make this Mobius strip.”
“But with a 3D printer, even a small model, we could make the whole structure from bottom to top without anyone seeing where it is beginning or ending,” he said.
Working with Dutch mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs and Dini in Italy, “we put the whole thing in the computer,” the architect said.
A Brazilian national park has expressed interest in the building, which would cost around €4m to construct, the architect said, or it could be built as a private home in the United States.
The project would take around 18 months to build and the printer “might be active for half a year,” Ruijssenaars said.
“The challenge is demonstrating that it’s possible to print real buildings in 3D and affirm that there is a new way to manufacture buildings,” Dini, 50, said by telephone from Italy.
Dini, who gave up his well-paid job in robotics designing prototypes for the footwear industry to build his monster printer, said that 3D printing of buildings remains a hybrid process with other building techniques for reinforcement.
“And it’s about being competitive with other construction techniques,” he said.
One advantage of using printing is that you can easily build-in empty spaces for plumbing and electrics – and that you can use rocks found in situ at the construction site, which could be almost anywhere.
“The great thing about the printer is that you can take it somewhere and then print with the ground you find on location,” Ruijssenaars said.
“So you could take the printer to the moon, assemble it there and print with moon material.”
The dogs on the street knew it was leaked by a garda and yet when they ask for people to come forward ” in the strictest of confidence” about gangland warfare, drugs or any crime they experience to people to trust them! If some bent cop got a few euros off a journo for a story then how much would they get for a grass in a drugs bust or the latest kinahan -hutch fued?
@Willie….And remember the €7,000 that wend missing from a” LOCKED” cell or room in a Garda Station that went missing?Whatever happened about that?Feck all….
Says it all. No one will be punished..
GSOC said enquiries revealed the journalist who sent the text messages had been in contact with a telephone number registered to a detective garda.
As part of the investigation, a Twitter account linked to the detective was found to have sent tweets to Clare Daly alluding to the incident.
“How big was the hot whiskey?” one asked. “Boiling a bottle of Jameson & swallowing it doesn’t count as 1″.
The garda said he could not recall sending these tweets to the TD and denied leaking any information. Well used words these days cant recall and denial..
If they have a telephone number registered to a detective Garda that was in contact with a journalist and also a Twitter account from the same Garda that sent the tweets.. why can’t anything be done about that?..
Wonder will everyone be able to use that excuse now.. it wasn’t me , it was my phone but it could have been anyone. Next time someone sends harassing phonecalls to someone .
There has always been political policing in this country. Remember the Heavy Gang, and also the Gardai harrassment of the Concerned Parents Against Drugs where they have evidence along with drug dealers in court. More recently the antics of Gardai against Shell to Sea activists and the ridiculous over policing and waste of resources at some water meter protests. There are plenty of fine Gardai but there is a significant minority who leave a lot to be desired.
Journalists should have to provide their sources when information which has been obtained is given illegally be the source. My point is people in positions with confidential private information selling this to a journalist should be named to at least a judge.
How do you prove it was received illegally? Unfortunately you can’t, except in the most extreme cases. For example, who is to say that the journalist didn’t receive a tip off from someone who drove passed the incident?
The Gardaí and indeed the justice department are not fit for purpose anymore, the amount of collusion with FG in particular should worry every citizen in the country, They have gone after Wallace,Daly and Murphy for daring to bring things into the public domain. then we have the scurrilous treatment of the whistle blowers and the lise in trying to discredit them.
They have politically policed the water debacle almost since it`s inception with arrests on some very shaky laws , there are 2 elderly men STILL in prison for demonstrating against IW, yet the person who assaulted them was allowed to get off scott free, even though the videos show him striking people including a woman, and a Garda can be seen trying to pull him off a person, and can be heard calling his name and asking him to let go, he didn`t even get a caution, then we have the scenes outside the Dáil on a regular basis of them pushing, kettling and hitting people who are exercising their constitutional right to protest.
Root and branch clear out is required at this stage,
no one ever held accountable in the Gardaí for anything it seems and they have turned into a poisonous force and will take years to rebuild trust with the general communities of Ireland.
And the Gardai wonder why confidence in them is non existent. Maurice McCabe was very lucky in that he, being a member, understood how dangerous it would be giving an interview without recording it.
The fit-up culture was well known to him and he would have been destroyed by the two senior Gardai who would have perjured themselves but for the recording.
They should make Maurice McCabe Commissioner at least he is an honest Man, but some how i doubt if the Government of this Country or some of the Gardai would allow it.
I fully agree with the Guards marching i think they should have a very high pay with the Nurses and Teachers.
No bother Noirin will investigate and get to the bottom of it straight away. Claire can relax now fully assured that the PC and fanny are on the case. God save Ireland.
And they want a pay rise. !! This is shocking stuff, on the one hand they’re complaining they are too busy to police the streets and on the other spend all day gossiping about clare Daly, what a sad bunch they really are.
Well if I ever do by the looks of the recent revelations and now this is doubt if they’d be of any real use at all. Well you know what they say about paying people peanuts and getting monkeys.
I totally agree with you Aoife seriously no one would be happy in any job if they weren’t being paid properly for it. And as you said about peanuts and monkeys but there are others in this country getting highly paid for doing a job for this country and they really don’t get anything done at all and I am afraid Claire Daly and Mick Wallace fall into that bracket .
The worrying thing is that the more you look into this the more you realise that it’s a lack of training in relation to the guards themselves. It’s apparent in all this stuff coming out via the media. There has to be proper accountability and sanctions applied along with real training for the guards.
Never said it was their fault that it was leaked no no no sur Claire Daly drinking and driving and getting caught by the Gardai before,possibly, injuring or even killing someone while intoxicated was not at fault at all and being able to stand up and have ago at the Gardai sur the Gardai are not people their not someone’s sons, daughters husbands wives brothers or sisters, no no no they’re just able to take all the crap from those 2 politicians and not feel a thing…God my heart bleeds for Daly and Wallace who let’s remember got away in a sense of defrauding the country of over 2 million euros in tax….wow I can see all the halos now! Such law abiding individuals who now represent the country!
Which is a pity because apparently our Gardai are supposed to be the best trained police force in Europe. Then there is the other side that like the Joe soap public, Gardai and all police officers are only human too.
Hi Littleone, I can’t say I know much about RD to be honest but to me anyone who can blatantly defraud their country of tax they owe should not be allowed to be represented on the Dail in any shape or form. If you can do that with no political clout consider what be done with political clout?????
What are you on about?.. are you saying they should be allowed leak confidential information to journalists ? Access the pulse system whenever? Because after all they are only human.
KIA if you read the article CAREFULLY you will discover that Claire was not charged with D & D and you have just slandered someone on a public forum and might find yourself in front of the courts for slander.
KIA knows lots about everyone…except FG TD’s who get his support….best not to read bad stuff about the FG TD’s you support or you could undermine your illusion about how great they are.
No I actually didn’t until now but let’s be a little fair here Mick Wallace had,aparently according to reports out in the public domain…..gotta cover myself against slander according to others on here …. an outstanding bill to the tune of over 2 million euro, but fraud is fraud
The Gardai seem to think they write their own laws. And in some ways they do as their Commissioner seems complicit in their abuse of the law. This and the McCabe case are prime examples of closing ranks around the wrongdoers. The Commissioner is holed below the waterline and will go under sooner or later. Will Fitzgerald cut her lose. Perhaps that’s why she was less than fully confident in the Commissioner.
And this Big brother carry on is facilitated and supported by the “security correspondents” and “crime correspondents” of RTE, the Irish Times, the Indo and all the other pathetic Corporate media shills.
So GSOC has stated ‘there appears to be sufficient evidence’ that the details of the arrest were leaked to the media by Gardai and then further state there was ‘insufficient evidence of a criminal offence’ – they don’t seem very sure. They’ve submitted files to the DPP on far less serious issues. Why didn’t they submit a file and let the DPP decide – they have always been quite eager to let cases run and let a Judge/Jury decide. In this case they even went so far as to examine members phones and clearly didn’t find anything. They also tracked emails. To this day I firmly believe that Clare Daly or someone in her camp leaked the information. Her hatred for AGS is well known.
State Corruption at its most vilest; rotten to the core. Just look how well Frances Fitzgerald, Máire Whelan and Noreen O’Sullivan have done? They are all useless and incompetent and not educated or suitable to be in their positions of ‘power’ (corruption)
Any time Fine Gael are in power the Gardai feel free to run amok and do so with impunity. This has happened many times in the past with little corrective consequences.
We will need a very strong, independent ,police authority to curb these excesses developing further…
I’m not a fan of her policies by any means but I do recognize her right to her views. She deserves a formal apology from the powers that be. Gsoc know who leaked the info.
For gods sake when will all this end there’s some rotten apples in the force, you couldn’t make this stuff up! It’s not fair on all the good members of the force, the morale must be on the floor. The grief good Gardai have to go through every day I certainly couldn’t do. Oh it’s all going to be grand because Ireland’s answer to Queen Lizzie Frances Fitzgerald will upgrade the enquiry, who writes her speeches for her? She’s knows she’s telling fibs it’s written all over her face during leaders questions. And Noirin needs to go big time. A few more mishaps along the way surely…..
Wow isn’t it amazing that she would be up in arms about something like that being leaked to the newspapers when and let’s face herself and Mick Wallace are quick enough to shout out what they want and anyway I can’t see what the big deal is about it coz after her court date it would be in the papers anyway. …or is someone in the courts leaking info too ?????
Here is a clue why there is problem kia from the headline of this article “GSOC says details of Clare Daly’s arrest were leaked by gardaí – but no one will be punished”
There was no court date – she was not over the limit. This touches on several important issues – Garda confidentiality, political policing and the seeming inability of GSOC to effectively do its job. The fact that no one will be held to account for this is shocking, as is the extent of individual Gardai from all over the country accessing the PULSE system at the time, presumably because of Clare’s involvement with McCabe and other whistleblowers. It’s completely unacceptable for journalists to have access to information on the PULSE system, which clearly was being fed to them by someone. This is not about Clare’s arrest, it is about an essential part of our democratic society. We should be grateful to people like her for raising this stuff publicly.
Clare Daly should be compensated for the breach of her privacy. She should then be fined twice the compensation to cover all the costs involved for the state in her own publicity seeking stunt while breaking the law Shannon.
That gaurd spoke like a stalker hope he is out of the force.
I fully believe in the Guards in this Country so it’s up to the honest and law abiding guards to get the others out.
We need some one like Maurice McCabe as Commissioner who will work with honesty and transparency as far as i’m concerned Mr McCabe should be promoted and for the good of our Country.
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