3D-printed house going up in Nome

By Laura Robertson |

Tucked between the KICY radio station and the Arctic Native Brotherhood Club, an experimental, 3D-printed house sits half-finished after a 3D printer has started churning out the walls of the building in mid-August.
The house, which is anticipated to be about 1,200 square feet, would be the first of its kind in the Arctic.
A tall, orange, robotic arm was brought to Nome by the military last winter and it could be seen constructing the quickly growing walls.
The walls of the house are 3D- printed out of concrete, while the roof will be built traditionally.
Work on the house began in June, when workers poured a concrete foundation. The walls started to arise in mid-August, but the team had to stop before they had finished.
The house is being constructed by X-Hab 3D, with support from the City of Nome, the Denali Commission, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and University of Alaska Fairbanks, among other partners.
The building has been paused because of “quality-control issues,” explained Keith Comstock, X-Hab’s executive director. Comstock was speaking last Friday on his way to Maryland, where he was going to talk to the military about 3D-printing structures to house soldiers.
The concrete which the builders were using to construct Nome’s 3D-printed house was “contaminated” with large rocks in it. Comstock said they found this out when a rock got stuck in a pipe. They had to stop work on the project for several weeks.
The 3D printers will be returning in the middle of this month to finish building the house. The electricity has already been put in, according to Comstock.
“Our goal is to try to significantly bend the cost curve for construction in rural Alaska using advanced tools and techniques,” Comstock told the Nugget earlier this month, “and that includes things like 3D concrete printing, different kinds of robotics, and then different kinds of advanced materials.”
While this house is the first of its kind in an Arctic climate like Nome’s, it is not the first in Alaska. Last year, X-Hab built a test structure in Fairbanks, although it remained uninhabited.
At the same time that the Nome house is being built, a similar structure is being built in Pennsylvania.
The printer is currently intended to remain in Nome.

Jenni Monet contributed reporting to this story.