3D printed house offers resilience and beauty
Hurricanes taught Jason Ballard that conventional American homes are deadly fragile as a child growing up in the town of Orange on the Gulf Coast near the Louisiana border.
Conservation classes at Texas A&M taught Ballard that building construction produces more landfill debris, uses more water, and wastes more energy than any other industry.
At the SXSW tech conference in Austin, Ballard explained to visitors how a home designed to be 3D printed can withstand what climate change can throw at it, minimize waste and inefficiency, while still looking great.
“I looked at everything: zip panels, shipping container homes, manufactured homes, modular homes, the weirdest thing I looked at was probably the architectural mushroom, where you would like to, like, grow a house” , he told me. “When I got to 3D printing and robotic construction more broadly, it was the only thing that worked on the spreadsheet of affordability, scalability, durability, beauty and dignity.”
Ballard, founder and CEO of ICON Technology Inc., set out to develop the desktop 3D printers that made plastic toys ten years ago. He built a device 15.5 feet high and 46.5 feet wide capable of laying down layers of concrete two inches thick to construct a 3,000 square foot building.
His company has completed dozens of buildings, ranging from small houses to military barracks to a dwelling used by NASA to test the feasibility of living on Mars. But the home unveiled in Austin is the first structure explicitly designed to take full advantage of robotic construction.
“Robotically built houses, 3D printed houses want to be very different,” Ballard said. “If you just copy or appropriate the architectural forms and designs of contemporary homes, you end up appropriating many of their problems as well.”
ICON has partnered with San Antonio Lake Flato architecture firm, known for innovative designs that maximize the potential of locally sourced building materials and respond to the local climate. Lewis McNeel, an associate partner, said the company wanted to showcase the unique look of stamped concrete.
“The high-level house thinking was not just about showcasing stamped concrete, but how to show that it can help you produce the most attractive, user-friendly house you can imagine, and a house that works. for long-term living,” he said. .
The house is unlike any other, and the unique feature besides the layered gray concrete walls are the graceful curves that replace the straight edges. They contrast with linear doors, windows and blond wood structural beams.
The printer establishes two sets of walls, one exterior and one interior with insulation in between, to meet building standards, but the technique makes the walls more substantial. While the print pattern is apparent in most interiors, bathrooms and other areas are plastered or tiled similar to a traditional home.
In standard construction, having a curved corner or a corrugated wall requires highly skilled framers and drywall crews and can incur considerable costs. The 3D printer doesn’t care whether it’s a straight, pointed wall or a perfect circle; the cost and construction time are the same.
“If you wanted a house that was a perfect square, we could print you a perfect square,” Ballard said. If you want a Fibonacci spiral, we can print you a house in a Fibonacci spiral. »
ICON Technology is privately held and in start-up mode. Ballard raised an additional $185 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global Management last month, which was on top of raising $207 million in August, the TechCrunch website reported.
Ballard said the company is building 12 more printers in Austin this quarter and plans to ramp up production. The company recently struck a deal with residential construction giant Lennar to develop a neighborhood of 100 homes in the Austin area, all printed by machines on rails.
He said each print costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it’s already profitable to use them and he hopes to reduce production costs.
I asked Ballard about the potential negative impact on the climate of building so many houses out of concrete, which is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. But he insisted that concrete remains one of the best building materials available and that durable resilient structures are better for the planet in the long run.
Later that year, Ballard said he plans to build his first five homes along the Gulf Coast to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. He thinks robotic construction will solve a lot of problems.
“My childhood home is gone; my family spent Christmas in a FEMA trailer,” Ballard said. “So this one feels personal. We have to get out of this catastrophic loop on the coast.
Chris Tomlinson writes commentary on business, economics and politics.
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