Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, inaugurates the world’s first 3D-printed office in Dubai.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice-president and Prime Minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, inaugurates the world’s first 3D-printed office in Dubai.
Dubai has opened what it said was the world's first functioning 3D-printed office building, part of a drive by the Gulf's main tourism and business hub to develop technology that cuts costs and saves time.
The printers - used industrially and also on a smaller scale to make digitally designed, three-dimensional objects from plastic - have not been used much for building.
This one used a special mixture of cement, a Dubai government statement said, and reliability tests were done in Britain and China.
The one-storey prototype building, with floorspace of about 250 square meters (2,700 square feet), used a 20-foot (6-metre)by 120-foot by 40-foot printer, the government said.
-"This is the first 3D-printed building in the world, and it's not just a building, it has fully functional offices and staff,-" the United Arab Emirates Minister of Cabinet Affairs, Mohamed Al Gergawi, said.
-"We believe this is just the beginning. The world will change,-" he said.
The arc-shaped office, built in 17 days and costing about $140,000, will be the temporary headquarters of Dubai Future Foundation - the company behind the project - is in the center of the city, near the Dubai International Financial Center.
Gergawi said studies estimated the technique could cut building time by 50-70 percent and labor costs by 50-80 percent. Dubai's strategy was to have 25 percent of the buildings in the emirate printed by 2030, he said.
