The newest pour from Starbucks is a 3D printed store that’s set to open this week in Texas. The giant coffee chain with over 17,000 locations across the U.S. says the new drive-thru opening Friday in Brownsville will be its first in the U.S. using the technology.
I kind of think that if they’re going to do 3D printed structures, they’d do better to do buildings that can really play to the technology’s strengths: the ability to create fairly-arbitrary, organic shapes.
I mean, what they’ve got there is basically a rectangle with rounded corners. I guess the rounded corners are aesthetically unusual, but it doesn’t seem like it’s buying Starbucks a whole lot.
Starbucks clearly has been willing to set up custom locations using all kinds of architecture in the past:
https://www.klook.com/en-PH/blog/beautiful-starbucks-around-the-world/
Same thing with McDonalds:
https://www.businessinsider.com/weirdest-coolest-glamorous-mcdonalds-restaurants-in-the-world-2020-5
You’d think that if you’re going to use this exotic new construction technique that permits for a lot of unusual stuff, you could figure out a way to make some kind of eye-catching thing that leverages its strengths. Cost saving on construction is nice, sure, but…
Yeah, I’m not an expert in construction but I don’t really know what this buys you vs using, for example, insulating concrete forms.
It’s outlined in the article, fwiw.
The benefit is not needing workers to do the construction
I’m sure it’s a basic shape because the technology is in its infancy, and they wanted an actual building in the end. The fancy stuff comes later.
The more complex the design, the more expensive it’s going to be, even with this construction method. Starbucks is looking to do this as cheaply as possible.
Casting concrete requires building formwork to cast the concrete into. For any standardised shape constructing the formwork is easy: Just assemble it from the parts you have. Straight sections? The most common case. Rounded corners? As long as you’re fine with “should be round” and don’t require some very specific radius, those are probably also at hand. A gargoyle? Well that’s not an easy form to produce but once you have it, you can cast 1000 gargoyles.
Where 3d printing comes in is places where you have a shape that’s literally or nearly unique, where building the formwork would be a PITA. In all other cases, the traditional method is quicker and cheaper.
Also interesting is stuff like solar sintering plain sand.
Complexity doesn’t really add difficulty to 3d printing. My 3D printer doesn’t much care whether a head is moving in a straight line or doing a zig-zag. It’s gonna just keep extruding that concrete.
Kinda like how a 2D printer doesn’t much care whether you’re printing a detailed image or a very simple one.
I guess that there’s a material cost. But, then, that’s also true of existing buildings, and they clearly don’t optimize for that to the exclusion of all else, else there’d be no aesthetic used in designing those buildings.
Just coming from a civil engineering/construction perspective, the straight lines are probably more about alignment. In these kinds of buildings (and considering US zoning laws that require a certain amount of parking), sometimes the alignment is critical to ensuring the building, parking, and drive-through fit. Straight lines are easy to measure, draw, and check in the field. Not to mention the actual way these 3D printing concrete machines work. The ones I’ve seen online are on some kind of track, and these ones are no different. From the looks of it, they’re kind of set up like those cranes you see at shipyards: https://youtube.com/shorts/igQ9G_Brkl8
there was a moment in the 1990s when a computer application didnt have to be rectangular. stoner fantasies of wonderful possibilities blossomed and a couple of interesting examples showed up like Sonique media player for windows. however it quickly became obvious that rectangles were the most useful, everything else was a compromise within constraints. if you were to build a sculptural house, imagine having to also build the furniture and lighting and everything to fit without being annoying or wasteful.
I would think like with wavy brick walls, wavy or curved walls would end up using less materials due to reduced surface area.
Your 3d printer doesn’t have other utilities to accommodate. The printing is basically just the walls. Every other utility (Power, water, sanitary, HVAC, foundations, windows, doors, metal fabrications, networking etc) are all still done by people, all made with options made by other manufacturers.
Your printer also uses quick setting thermoplastic, not a concrete slurry that needs to set over the course of days instead of fractions of a second.
This and typical FDM printing are related, but truths about printing out a plastic trinket don’t necessarily translate to large concrete structures.
Beat me to it. I was imagining the horror involved in wiring or plumbing such a space. Don’t know much about HVAC, but there would be weird hot and cold spots in an oddly shaped structure.