Earth

A 3D Printed Home

ICON is an Austin-based construction technologies company on a mission to make safe, affordable housing, using 3D printer technology.
Their massive 3D printer is portable and can be operated across a wide variety of rough and rural conditions. This is crucial to their global mission

Their ‘Vulcan II’ printer works just like a desktop 3D printer, but it is big enough to print walls. It squirts out a concrete mix in layers like soft serve ice cream and it can build design components that are difficult to do with traditional construction, such as curves, circles, ellipses, and spirals.

The result is an elegant, custom-designed home that can be built almost anywhere in the world in as little as one day, with zero waste and at a fraction of conventional costs. The concrete materials can be locally sourced and are far more durable than conventional ones, and these simple designs are earthquake and hurricane resistant.

“If we want to get our hands on the global housing crisis, not across hundreds of years but in tens of years, we need a highly scalable solution, which 3D printing will be,” says Jason Ballard, Icon’s cofounder and CEO.

ICON has partnered with charities and governments, to 3D print tiny homes for the homeless in Texas, as well as building the world’s first 3D printed community in Mexico – creating homes for people who live on as little
as $3 a day.

These unique homes are custom designed with input from their future occupants, then printed on site, providing sustainable, useful solutions to those who need it most.

And if construction on Earth wasn’t enough, ICON is also partnering with NASA, to build structures on the moon, taking 3D printing, out of this world.