If you’ve got the right kind of 3D printer these days, you can manufacture everything from plumbing pipes to the wrench for installing them, but architect Pitupong Chaowakul is way ahead of that. He’s printed out a home.

Hacking into the future of home-building technology, the Siam Cement Group (SCG) and Pitupong have produced Southeast Asia’s first printer-spawned dwelling, the “Y-Box Pavilion, 21st-century Cave”. It’s on view until Sunday in the “Architect16″ exhibition” at the Muang Thong Thani Impact complex.

It’s a concept for the modern century that happens to vaguely resemble a cave, but if Fred Flintstone saw it, he would definitely be yelling “Yabba dabba DOO!”

“It’s a cave, indeed – but a 21st-century cave,” says Pitupong, who spent years on the design with SCG’s research-and-development department. The designation “Y-Box”, he says, is a pun on the question architects always ask about housing – “Why does it have to be a box?”

The new 3D printing technology is making tremendous waves, revolutionising everyday life on almost every imaginable scale. In medicine, surgical instruments and orthopaedic hip and knee implants can be printed out. Astronauts deep in space can print a needed spare part, though at the same time, criminals can also print untraceable guns.

From small items and components, the 3D printer is now scaling up to create house beams and whole buildings.

In the case of the Y-Box Pavilion, a special kind of cement is used, along with powders and fibres, to fabricate parts in a process that greatly speeds construction and allows for dramatic shapes in place of the customary upright columns and flat walls. The building needn’t look “boxy” at all, but can instead be freely structured.

The pavilion comprises six twisting columns that call to mind cave stalagmites – or perhaps even the rough-hewn pillars of Stonehenge in England. The central element of the interior design is a geodesic lamp 70 centimetres in diameter that is itself composed of 180 triangular pieces.

“Every single part is printed out on a 3D printer,” says Sanit Kessuwan, head of R&D at SCG. “The pavilion was printed in sections at the SCG factory and then all the components were simply snapped together.”

The design alone took three months, he says, and the printing another month, using a massive machine made in Italy. The special cement paste, a binding agent, was formed into stone-like material for the structure, solid enough to withstand high compression.

The 3D printing technology blows the field of architecture wide open, says Pitupong. Designers and homebuilders can now move far beyond the usual concepts in floors, walls and ceilings. Walls can arch to the ceiling in elegant curves. “The technology allows craft and industry to merge,” he says.

He’s enthusiastic enough about the science to speculate that architects and builders armed with 3D printers could easily replicate the Taj Mahal, perhaps the world’s most beautiful edifice and a monument to 17th-century Persian craftsmanship. The iconic mausoleum in ivory-white marble took 20,000 stonemasons and artists 11 years to complete.

“Craftsmen today probably couldn’t duplicate the Taj Mahal without the help of 3D printing technology,” says Pitupong. “It’s an additive technology that’s having a huge impact on design and construction.”

“And there’s huge potential for savings in terms of labour, time and transportation costs,” Sanit adds.

Had the technology been available last century, it’s safe to say, Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi’s wondrous Sagrada Familia temple in Barcelona would not remain famously unfinished.

The technology is by now so advanced that it can created structural beams that mimic bone – hard on the outside but spongy on the inside and thus more resilient than concrete.

Nevertheless, SCG says, houses that are 3D-printed aren’t going to replace conventional brick-block-and-concrete buildings anytime soon. The process remains far more expensive, for a start. The Y-Box Pavilion – a basic dwelling with six columns that couldn’t possibly be considered a complete home – cost about Bt1 million to manufacture.

So, while the technology answers the higher calling of innovative design whose requirements go beyond the capabilities of human handiwork, the vast majority of people are, for the foreseeable future, still going to be living in “boxes”.