Ian Comishin was scrolling through the internet when a video he describes as clickbait caught his eye.

The video pitched using 3D printers to make homes, but no one involved appeared to know what they were doing.

“They were building these janky things that really looked like they’re taking small desktop printers and just trying to make them bigger and bigger and bigger,” says Comishin.

Comishin thought he could improve on the idea. He had experience in automation, having just sold a company that made wind turbine blades, and was on the hunt for a new project.

In 2018, Comishin co-founded Twente Additive Manufacturing (TAM) with five others in The Netherlands, and a year later relocated to the Kootenays where he was born and raised. In the small community of Procter east of Nelson, Comishin and his employees have just completed TAM’s first home-built using a 3D printer of its own design called the Fibonacci House.

TAM isn’t the first North American company to build a home using a 3D printer — that honour belongs to Texas-based ICON. But it is the first Canadian company to develop the technology, which uses custom concrete mixes to build hollow walls that can be then filled in with insulation.

The process is also fast. The printer builds walls like a baker puts icing on a cake, with the mix coming out of a nozzle as it runs back and forth, gradually building layers. For the 300-square-foot Fibonacci House, Comishin says the printing took five days, followed by eight-to-10 days of laying the pieces down.

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