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Luxury 3D-printed homes debut in Texas

Austin’s Icon founder sees future of neighborhoods built by robots

Icon CEO Jason Ballard (Twitter via Jason D Ballard)
Icon CEO Jason Ballard (Twitter via Jason D Ballard)

Austin startup Icon’s juggernaut of innovation advances this month with its debut of the first home for buyers who want high-end design in their 3D-printed residences.

Printing for the home and a guest house took a total of eight days, reported Austin Inno. Marquee Central Texas architectural firm Lake/Flato designed “House Zero,” as it’s been christened. The 2,000-square-foot, one-story residence has three bedrooms and a 350-square-foot accessory dwelling unit next door. Icon says it’s a hybrid home: a first-of-its kind collaboration between its large-scale 3D printer and human architects and builders.

Icon will showcase House Zero at South by Southwest March 13 and 14. It’s two miles from downtown Austin, at 1700 Riverview Street in the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood. After the event, the company will hang on to House Zero to use as a model home for a while before selling it.

House Zero is one in a long series of firsts for Icon. It debuted the first permitted 3D-printed home at SXSW 2018, when festival attendees saw Icon’s trademark Vulcan printer create a small house in two days or so, delayed slightly by heavy rains. It’s a move that’s become part of the company’s marketing strategy, which makes sense for an event that in 2019 drew more than 400,000 people, many of them major tech players.

Icon went on to create six printed houses for Community First homeless village in East Austin and collaborated with a housing nonprofit to print a community of homes in Tabasco, Mexico. It developed the first such homes for sale in the United States. It’s working with Lennar and Bjarke Ingels Group to develop a community with 100 3D-printed homes in Austin. It also works with NASA on such projects as rocket launching pads and potential habitats for Mars and the moon.

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Icon has raised $451 million since it was founded in 2017. It’s booked to deliver more than 500 homes, 30 percent of them affordable or social housing and 70 percent to be sold at market rates. Ballard said that scaling up would be necessary to meet his ambitious production goals. That would require making more Vulcan printers and a business model that allows their use by companies other than Icon.

It’s banking on the lower cost of materials and labor involved for 3D printing will ultimately result in more, better housing for people at all economic levels.

“This is all just a deposit on the future,” said Icon co-founder and CEO Jason Ballard. “I truly think in the future that entire streets and neighborhoods and communities will be built by robots.”

[Austin Inno] — Cindy Widner

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