Bright Community Trust to build 3D printed house in St. Pete

Providing attainable housing opportunities to community members is at the heart of Bright Community Trust’s mission. 

The nonprofit builds homes that it eventually sells to clients. However, the properties are held in a land trust. This ensures long-term affordability. 

Bright Community Trust president and chief impact officer Frank Wells believes that innovation can have an invaluable impact on the Tampa Bay region in the future. 

Currently, the organization is collaborating with construction technology company Solvenah to build a 3D printed home in St. Petersburg’s Childs Park neighborhood. The Build Additive organization developed the machine to perform the work. 

According to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 3D printing is “a method of making a physical object from a three-dimensional digital model, typically by laying down many thin layers of a material in succession.” 

For this endeavor, just the exterior walls will be “printed.” The house is expected to be completed by September. 

“Bright has been keeping an eye on emerging technologies in the housing sector for a long time,” Wells explained. “There have been some challenges with these technologies getting them to speed and making them commercially viable.” 

Once Wells met the Solvenah and Build Additive teams, he realized that they had identified some of the barriers to “3D printing” homes.

Carl David is one of the founders of Solvenah (formerly known as BIA Robotics). He is the building contractor on the project. 

“We’re trying to basically take innovation and apply it to the design and build aspect of building a home,” David said. “So, we’re trying to build a house properly, structurally sound and have some character to it.” 

Decisions such as slab curvatures can provide more creative flexibility for home owners. 

He explained that creating the mixture has been one of the biggest challenges for the effort. This is due to humidity and heat. If the mixture is not “right,” it could impact the quality of the concrete.

A 3D printed exterior wall. Photo by Michael Connor.

For David, teamwork has been essential, especially due to the project’s experimental nature. 

“We’re trying to figure out different ways to make this the most efficient,” he explained. “Working together with different minds that really excel in their areas of expertise, to me, has been the best part.” 

Daniel Hechavarria is Solvenah’s co-founder and construction operations and development associate. 

“Our goal is to build a self-sustainable home,” he explained. “We’re here to make a change for St. Pete and the surrounding communities as well. We’re trying to repeat this over and over again.” 

Frank Marquette is the co-founder of the Michigan-based Build Additive. He said that this is the first time the company’s machine has been deployed in Florida. 

A proprietary cement formulation is mixed on site, Marquette explained. Utilizing a nozzle, the 3D printer then uses the blend to create the walls. The process is completed layer by layer. 

“Bright is always looking for ‘how do we keep our budget as workable as possible?’ and ‘how do we reduce the construction timeline on these homes?’,” Wells said. “We have more and more demand for housing, but our construction trades have fewer and fewer workers.” 

People are aging out of the business, he added, and not enough individuals are replacing them.

Bright Community Trust’s Childs Park 3D printed home. Rendering provided.

Bright Community Trust plans to work on additional 3D printed projects in the future. 

“We can go out to a different home site and pour another slab and basically print the exact same house,” Wells explained. “We’re expecting that doing one house will probably not actually save any dollars, but when we go and do a group of four or five houses together, being able to do this quickly and move from one to the next will actually start both producing financial and time savings.”  

Bright Community Trust website