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Since 2018, ICON, based in Austin, Texas, has been printing houses in the area and beyond using a robotic arm that carefully layers a concrete-like material. Now the company plans to bend the same arm – or more – by building a neighborhood of 100 single-family homes designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). The sublime project is being created in partnership with home builder Lennar and promises to become the largest community of 3D printed homes in North America.
ICON 3D home printers teamed up with global architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and home builder Lennar to create a printed house neighborhood in Austin, Texas.
ICON’s first 3D-printed house, a 350-square-foot residential home in Austin that was completed in just 47 hours using the company’s proprietary Lavacrete concrete mix, attracted a number of interested customers and employees.
In 2019, for example, the company began working with nonprofit New Story to build an affordable housing estate in Mexico and reduce construction time per home to just 24 hours. In 2020, ICON partnered with nonprofit Loaves & Fishes and design firm Logan Architecture to launch a 51 acre development of 3D printed homes for the homeless in Austin.
Earlier this year, ICON worked with Bjarke Ingels Group and NASA to print a simulated Mars habitat at the Johnson Space Center, and also saw the completion of America’s first 3D-printed shared apartment, East 17th Street Residences in East Austin. That summer, the company produced the largest 3D-printed building in North America for the Texas Department of Defense.
The structures of the house would be 3D printed and crowned with overhanging pitched roofs built using more traditional methods.
Whether you are a capital federal agency or a charitable charity, building fast without construction teams means a potential paradigm shift.
“ICON exists in response to the global real estate crisis and to bring our technology to the world,” says ICON co-founder and CEO Jason Ballard. “The United States has a shortfall of approximately five million new homes, so there is an urgent need to increase supply quickly without compromising on quality, beauty, or sustainability – and that is exactly the strength of our technology.”
Now comes the biggest challenge so far: single-family houses that are to be sold at market price. ICON plans to print the 100 homes using their Vulcan printers – the robotic arms – which can print concrete structures up to 3,000 square feet.
When completed, this would be the largest 3D printed neighborhood in the world.
The renderings provided by ICON show a development of houses starting with rounded Lavacrete structures and ending with overhanging roofs embedded with photovoltaic panels. The construction would follow the statics standard of the International Building Code. However, ICON says its proprietary building material will last longer than traditional concrete masonry and offer resilience in a time of increasing natural disasters and climate change.
“Additive manufacturing has the potential to revolutionize the built environment as it is being adopted by industry on a large scale,” says Martin Voelkle, partner at BIG. “The 3D-printed architecture and the photovoltaic roofs are innovations that are important steps to reduce waste in the construction process and to strengthen our houses more resilient, more sustainable and more energy self-sufficient.”
The result of these obvious advances in home building may not be for everyone. Between the monotonous concrete ambience and the almost Levittown-like uniformity of the neighborhood, some may find that these houses lack many architectural nuances or variations. However, the same applies to traditional stick houses in most of the new subdivisions, which take considerably longer to build and are usually built according to building plans off the peg.
If built, the development proposed by ICON would efficiently meet the housing needs, and with the help of BIG, they would look great.
More from ICON:
America’s first development of 3D printed houses hits the market in Austin, Texas
ICON unveils the world’s first village with affordable 3D printed homes in North America
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