Don Ajamian Construction, together with building 3D printing firm Emergent 3D, is set to build the world’s first 3D printed church in Tehama County, California.
Commissioned by the Lake California Community Church, the new facility will feature interior and exterior walls 3D printed using a concrete system developed by COBOD. However, the roof will still be traditionally constructed and the church will have a conventional concrete slab.
According to Don Ajamian, Owner of Don Ajamian Construction, the inner walls of the 3D printed church were designed for maximum acoustic efficiency by a leading engineer in the field. Once complete, they’ll mimic the look of full-height curtains hanging down, but will be completely solid and rigid. This will reportedly help to direct sound waves straight to the audience in the center of the room.
“It is acoustically designed in such a way that the pastor probably will not even need a microphone to just stand up there and talk, everybody will hear it clearly,” Ajamian explains. “And they can be playing music in there and the room will be perfectly acoustically tuned.”
Pivoting to a 3D printed build
Don Ajamian was initially hired by the Lake California Community Church around a year ago, when the church asked him to build an entirely new facility. They’d already drafted up design plans for a conventional construction, but Ajamian suggested the church allow him to explore the use of 3D printing instead.
Due to the rising cost of traditional building materials, he thought a cost analysis on a 3D printed project might yield some significant cost savings. As it turns out, he was right and the company found that it could save the church around 10% on the cost by opting for additive manufacturing instead.
“We’ve been trying to build a church now for 20 something years,” explained Jim Laxson, the Pastor for Lake California Community Church. “And now with the 3D printing, we’re going to be able to build it more economically.”
The benefit of speed
As well as the cost savings, the move to 3D printing is expected to drastically expedite the build time of the church. Since the walls will be fabricated one layer at a time, both the interior and exterior segments will be printed simultaneously without the need for any structural additions, greatly speeding up the workflow.
“So I do not need to, for example, bring a bunch of stucco guys to put stuff on the outside or put siding on it,” Ajamian adds. “I don’t need to bring a bunch of drywall people in to drywall the inside wall. Literally, when these things get printed, that wall is finished other than the paint.”
Don Ajamian Construction has already completed all of the site grading, whereby the land is raised or lowered to provide a solid foundation. The partners are now waiting for the COBOD 3D printer to be shipped over from Denmark in April. Once the project plans have been submitted to Tehama County Building and Safety, Ajamian will work with Emergent 3D to 3D print the church sometime around the end of summer 2022.
Just recently, Azure Printed Homes became the first construction 3D printing company to repurpose plastic waste as a primary home building material. The news came alongside the announcement of a new 15,000 square foot factory in California to house the company’s custom-built construction 3D printer, which is capable of producing backyard studios, accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and, eventually, full-sized homes.
Elsewhere, Mexican building material supplier CEMEX recently developed a means of turning regular concrete into a more versatile aggregate, and deployed it to 3D print a low-cost home on the continent of Africa. Formulated in collaboration with COBOD, the D.fab admixture-boosted blend is said to gain shape instantaneously, lending it significant construction lead time and cost-minimizing potential.
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Featured image shows a rendering of the upcoming Lake California Community Church design. Image via Don Ajamian Construction.
