‘Building a house with concrete cloth faster than 3D printing’

Many of you probably know inflatable tents. You can set this up in seconds by inflating the inflatable frame of air bags with an air pump. But what if you used the same principle to build houses?

That’s exactly what a few smart guys have done, with concrete cloth. And that is of course a lot faster than if you have to do it by hand.

Concrete cloth, very versatile building material

The company ConcreteCanvas produces concrete cloth, cloth with cement powder. Concrete already has several advantages as a building material. It is extremely strong, easy to process and there are endless variations. Varying from reinforced concrete to heat-insulating concrete and concrete that is resistant to seawater.

As soon as these cloths get wet and harden, the material changes into rock hard concrete. They sell this material a lot for strengthening, for example, irrigation canals. The most spectacular application of their canvas is concrete shelters that can be set up in a day.

This is how you build a house in 24 hours with concrete cloth

Building this structure is astonishingly easy. This is about as you can see in the picture below. You only need two people, a garden hose and, in the largest version, also a winch. After the package is rolled out, inflate the tent. Then you spray the concrete cloth that covers the tent wet with, for example, a garden hose.

And behold, there is your shelter. While you do something else, the concrete hardens. After 24 hours there will be a ready-made house. The lack of windows is of course a thing, but on the other hand, you can do something about it with a concrete saw. The insulation value is of course not spectacular, but you can solve that by placing a thick layer of earth or other material against the walls of the construction.

Ideal for the military and in a disaster area

This model is especially interesting for military applications or in disaster areas, but could also be used very well for house building. For example, in less well-organized countries such as Haiti, earthquake victims are still homeless after many years. Of this kind of inventions you solve that in one knock.