Growing up in a small town in East Texas, Jason Ballard didn’t imagine he would one day use robots to print houses. He was busy chasing flying squirrels and swimming with alligators in the dense conifer woods behind Texas’s pine curtain.
He felt called to God in those woods, which always smelled like Christmas. He thought he would be a preacher, and after high school, he entered the formal discernment process, a testing-of-the-waters of priesthood.
In addition to the heavens, he was drawn to big, romantic ideas about space above and the earth below. So he reached for both. First, he earned a bachelor’s degree in conservation biology, and fascinated with sustainable building, he took on an apprenticeship in carpentry (the biblical parallels were not lost on him). He also earned a master’s degree in space resources to perhaps pursue becoming an astronaut.
But what Mr. Ballard carried with him from his childhood, between happy recollections of horseback rides and airborne rodents, was the memory of spending a Christmas in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer. Hurricane Andrew, which killed 65 people, had forced his family to evacuate from Orange, Texas. He would later evacuate from Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike, as well.
His mission, he decided, would be to stay exactly where he had started, in Texas, and develop housing. The homes would be sturdy, maybe even miraculous, and cheaper to construct yet better suited to withstand hurricanes and fires. In 2017, Mr. Ballard co-founded ICON, a construction technology company that is focused on using 3-D printers to help solve the housing crisis that has crushed the dream of homeownership for the majority of young Americans.
3-D printing, which builds objects layer by additive layer from a digital file, could be a solution to the beleaguered housing market, where sky-high costs, rock-bottom inventory and a shortage of skilled workers have made prices crushing for the majority of Americans. It’s cheaper than traditional construction. It requires fewer workers to build a home, and significantly less time. And the handful of upstart companies that are using it to successfully build houses say their structures are better suited to withstand hurricanes and fires, as well.
“The future is in this kind of technology,” said Jason Copley, an engineer turned lawyer who is now a partner at Cohen Seglias, a construction and business law firm in New Jersey.
ICON doesn’t publicly disclose its valuation, but it’s estimated to be around $1 billion. The company is based in Austin and is opening a second permanent office in Miami this fall. It is not the only company in this market, but in its size and scope — including a 100-home neighborhood in Texas that is the world’s only 3-D printed community — it is a leader in this emerging space.
“A big chunk of the world still doesn’t believe it, so there’s still this ground game of belief,” said Mr. Ballard, 43. “We just have to continue to put our work out in the world, and see it inhabited.”
‘Can You Print a House?’
In 2011, Mr. Ballard had a different idea to address the affordable housing crisis and climate change. He created an eco-friendly home-improvement store in Austin called Treehouse. Housed in a 25,000-square-foot former Borders bookstore, it was something like a Home Depot but without any of the gas-powered lawn tools and packages wrapped in PVC film.
He had real success — opening two more stores in Texas filled with items like solar panels and nontoxic paint and pulling in angel investors to the tune of $35 million. But peddling cork flooring wasn’t going to move the needle — the ministry of green housing wasn’t reaching the masses.
A mutual friend who was working in 3-D printing introduced him to Alex Le Roux, who had recently graduated from Baylor University.
“Jason is a sales grandmaster,” said Mr. Le Roux, ICON’s former chief technology officer who co-founded the company alongside Mr. Ballard and Evan Loomis. They understood each other: Mr. Le Roux grew up in Houston, hunkering down with his family under Hurricane Rita, and then Ike, and then Harvey.
Climate change, they agreed, was shifting the equation on housing, and the need for a better solution was urgent. Mr. Le Roux had designed a 3-D printer that used concrete to print large-scale projects but was getting pitches to print things like concrete planters and adorable knickknacks.
Mr. Ballard had a different vision: “Can you print a house?”
“He saw this as a technology that addressed a lot of the problems that he saw with housing,” Mr. Le Roux said. “If you look at all the problems in the world, we don’t need more precast piping. We need affordable housing.”
The two men went to work, divvying up their duties. As Mr. Le Roux designed the company’s first printer Vulcan I, Mr. Ballard sought out investors and locked down their first customers.
After a year of working nights and weekends, Vulcan I was ready. It printed the first 3-D printed house in the United States, a 350-square-foot structure with curved walls and a sloped roof, printed over 48 hours with plenty of stops and starts to fix bugs in the printer.
The co-founders exhibited it at South by Southwest and secured $9 million in seed funding.
Houses Built by Vulcans
ICON now has more than 200 houses built in five states and two countries, largely outpacing competitors that are building communities in California and creating printers and cement-like “ink” to sell to builders.
Wolf Ranch, with its 100 houses in Georgetown, Texas, a bedroom community 30 minutes outside of Austin, is ICON’s flagship project. Breaking ground in 2022, the project is 98 percent sold and is currently the largest community of 3-D printed houses in the country.
Lennar, one of the country’s largest homebuilders, collaborated with ICON for the development. Bjarke Ingels Group, the architectural firm, codesigned the community’s eight housing models, which each have three or four bedrooms.
The houses are priced between $325,000 and $560,000, slightly below the median home price in Austin. Construction experts say that 3-D printing is a significantly cheaper and faster way to build homes, with most estimates citing a cost savings of around 30 percent.
Each of the homes in Wolf Ranch was built in three weeks or less by a 4.75-ton industrial printer that poured both its exterior and interior walls with lavacrete, a proprietary material made from pulverized red lava rock, cement and water that is squeezed out in layers, much like toothpaste onto a brush.
As an insulator, concrete helps to keep homes naturally cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. ICON estimates its homeowners pay 45 to 60 percent less on energy bills than their neighbors with traditional stick-built houses.
The homes, which are significantly more durable than those made with bricks or wood, are more than three times stronger than the Texas building standard. The walls are certified to handle 200 mile-an-hour winds and at least two hours of fire.
Despite its construction, Wolf Ranch’s vibe is suburbia, not sci-fi. It has big master planned energy. But look closely at the homes’ exteriors and you’ll see there are no sharp edges. Constructed by robot, all walls, both inside and out, have soft curved angles and are ridged like corduroy pants.
“The world of real estate is governed by self-fulfilling prophecies, and what is on the market tends to perpetuate itself,” said Bjarke Ingels, the architect. “We pioneers need to start offering something else.”
The ICON houses come with fixtures, like solar panels and a standing seam metal roof, that are usually reserved for those at a higher cost. The roofs are more durable, energy-efficient and fire-resistant than traditional ones. Wolf Ranch has access to walking trails, fitness centers and a community center with a swimming pool.
From Mexico to Marfa to the Moon
ICON has built other housing in Austin, including 60 tiny homes for chronically homeless residents, with another 60 on the way, and five luxury houses of 3,000 to 4,000 square feet in Wimberley, an Austin exurb that is rapidly developing.
The company has projects in other countries, too — including a small village of 3-D printed houses for impoverished residents of Nacajuca, Mexico — and even other atmospheres. Through a partnership with NASA, the company is gearing up to print houses on the moon.
Nacajuca sits in a seismic zone, and the homes there have already withstood a magnitude 7.4 earthquake despite extensive regional damage.
The company has also printed army barracks for the United States armed forces and a 2,000-square-foot, midcentury modern ranch house in East Austin with a net-zero energy output. It is beginning work on El Cosmico, a 60-acre site in Marfa, Texas, which eventually will house model homes, a restaurant and the world’s first 3-D printed hotel, all printed on site in the desert in sand-colored loops and domes. They expect to launch building this fall.
“Everyone laughed about the internet and smartphones, too, at first,” Mr. Ballard said. “There will be a breaking point when we break through.”
That breaking point might be closer than ever.
In 2023, the International Code Council, which is widely seen as the arbiter of building codes throughout the United States, began working to lay out standards for 3-D printed construction. The move will streamline developers’ approval process for 3-D printed houses at the local level.
Building codes, said Patti Harburg-Petrich, a structural engineer who serves as design executive at the construction company Swinerton, are the number one factor currently preventing the technology from scaling. “For new technology to get permitted, there are a lot of checks,” she said. “That’s really the big driver in terms of why things take so long.” Those standards are likely to be adopted as soon as 2027.
It’s a shift that could bring significant relief to an industry where tariffs, supply chain disruptions and an increase in the price of building materials have caused prices to skyrocket.
But the cost of building the printers — a half a million dollars or more — plus the cost of land have slowed the adoption of 3-D printing, said Jenny Schuetz, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in housing policy. She now oversees housing strategies for Arnold Ventures, a philanthropic foundation.
Phoenix, and Rising
Still, ICON is moving forward, with 17 active Vulcan printers in its fleet. But in the next two years, the company plans to debut a new prototype, the Phoenix, which it says can print foundations and roofs as well as walls and will be able to build not just houses, but multifamily apartment buildings.
In tandem with the development of Phoenix, ICON has created a digital catalog of 60 home designs that its technology can print. They come in five categories: Texas modern, fire-resilient, storm-resilient, affordable and avant-garde. An AI architect, currently in the pilot stage, could allow users to input specific preferences for a home and eventually create custom home-build designs that can then be printed on demand.
“It’s impossible to solve the global housing crisis doing things the way we’ve been doing them,” Mr. Ballard said. “The way it will be solved is through robotics and automation.”
Debra Kamin reports on real estate for The Times, covering what it means to buy, sell and own a home in America today.
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