Op-Ed: 3D printed glass bricks – Endlessly recyclable, design-friendly, and strong.

Germany’s energy emergency is threatening the very existence of glassmaker Heinz-Glas – Copyright AFP/File ISAAC LAWRENCE

MIT every now and then makes itself useful with what are essentially just plain good ideas. This is one of those ideas, and it could add a whole new dimension to architecture and construction.

These glass bricks are completely reconfigurable. Do please check the MIT link here, because it’s fascinating. You can take a building apart and just put up another one with the same materials onsite. You could also alter or repurpose parts of a building.

The 3D print motif takes all this a few steps further. 3D printing is efficient, customizable, and can be done anywhere. It’s slowly becoming the default option for a lot of different industries.

Put simply – Combine the same sort of specifications you need for building materials with that level of efficiency. This idea is that fundamentally sound at the baseline production level.  In theory, you could customize every brick with an ornate Renaissance design and built-in Wi Fi.

In practice, you could almost certainly put together a high-quality building on Mars using local materials like that grim-looking Martian microdust. You could also rebuild most of the rotting structures on Earth into long-lasting dependable environments worth living in.

Waste is a huge problem for the construction industry. Highly vulnerable building materials simply corrode over time. It’s an expensive problem for builders because these materials become a liability over time.

Time, in fact, is one of the huge expenses in managing these old materials. They have to be removed before work can be done. That process can be dangerous for workers onsite. The materials are themselves sometimes dangerous, contaminated, and usually not usable afterward.

Compare that to simply disassembling a building and putting up a new one with no waste, no laborious time-consuming days or weeks of demolition and removal. Bearing in mind that most of this ridiculously dilapidated world needs rebuilding, that’s another major plus for living environments.

Construction industry please note – The disassembly process really just reconfigures the construction process and makes it that much more efficient. You gain valuable time and lose the costs of demolition. It’s a win-win.

Better still – Glass is extremely tough and a good all-round construction material. It can take high temperatures and won’t burn down. You can get an accurate level of consistency with the 3D print mix able to take any stresses you like.

It can be thermally managed with any sort of modern insulation. In some forms, it might even be able to thermally regulate itself by simply reflecting or redirecting heat.

You can color it, shape it, whatever. Imagine a 40-storey stained glass building. This sort of usage isn’t quite glassblowing but consider the scale options for large structures using 3D printing technology.

Looks like the future just got a lot more practical, doesn’t it?