If it can scale, the 3D-printing process promises to deliver energy-efficient and climate-resilient homes that can be built faster, in novel designs and with minimal construction waste.
By Todd Woody
Amid the tech boom-fueled sprawl in Austin, Texas, Wolf Ranch at first appears to be another colorfully named but architecturally unimaginative suburban subdivision. Until, that is, you turn a corner and stumble across giant robots building homes resembling waves frozen in concrete.
This 100-house addition to the 2,500 homes planned for Wolf Ranch is called “the Genesis Collection,” and as the world’s largest 3D-printed community, it is indeed sui generis. A collaboration between Lennar Corp., the US’s second-biggest home builder, and 3D-printing startup Icon, Genesis represents perhaps the most significant innovation in residential construction in decades. If it can scale, 3D-printed construction promises to deliver energy-efficient homes that can be built faster and more affordably, in novel designs and with minimal waste. The concrete structures are also more resilient to increasingly intense climate-driven hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves.
“I think we’ll look back and say this was a pretty pivotal moment in the history of construction,” says Jason Ballard, Icon’s cowboy hat-wearing co-founder and chief executive officer. “I do think 3D printing and robotic construction are necessary to end the global housing crisis.”
Labor shortages, rising material costs and pressure to reduce housing’s carbon footprint are driving a tradition-bound industry to innovate, according to Lennar Executive Chairman Stuart Miller. “We’ve been building homes basically the same way for centuries,” he says. “We recognize that limitations around materials and labor are constraining factors relative to building the homes that the country needs, so we have been very focused on looking at techniques and solutions to build more effectively, more efficiently and more affordably.”
Those shifts led Lennar in 2021 to invest in Austin-based Icon, which has raised $451 million since it was founded in 2017. Miller says Wolf Ranch will produce data on 3D printing’s potential to save time and money at construction sites.
Icon built its first permitted home, a 350-square-foot residence, in 2018 to demonstrate the abilities of its first-generation Vulcan printer. The machine extrudes a proprietary concrete mixture called Lavacrete, which it lays down layer upon layer to form the exterior and interior walls of a building.
The latest iteration of the Vulcan is house-sized itself. The 46.5-foot-wide robot consists of a crossbar that moves up and down between two 15.5-foot-tall towers that sit astride a foundation. Attached to the cross bar is a nozzle that shuttles from side to side.
On a January afternoon at Wolf Ranch, seven of the robots can be seen layering Lavacrete on foundations that overlook the limestone hills of Georgetown, a rapidly growing bedroom community 30 miles north of downtown Austin. In the construction office, big screens display the Vulcans’ progress down to the number of layers laid down at each building site. A billboard advertises the arrival of a Jetsons-promised future: “3D-Printed Homes Coming Soon.”
In contrast to the din of a typical construction site swarmed by laborers hammering wood frames and hanging drywall, quiet pervades Wolf Ranch — the silence punctuated by the ambient hum of printers attended to by four workers apiece. Instead of a foreperson directing a construction crew from a blueprint, an Icon employee holds a tablet loaded with software for the eight different Genesis Collection homes that the Vulcan is programmed to construct. The building site is clean, too; there’s virtually no construction debris to be hauled off to a landfill.
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