Does a Texas Development Reveal the Future of Residential Construction?

There are plenty of things you can make with a 3D printer, including auto parts, medical devices and video game controllers. And while those categories don’t have much in common, there is one thing that they share: a relatively modest scale. Alternately, when you think of 3D printing, the object you’re probably envisioning being printed is roughly handheld and not, say, much larger than a human being. And yet with a big enough printer and the right designs, it’s possible to get very ambitious with what you’re building.

How ambitious? How about elegantly designed residencies, for one thing? Outside of Austin, Texas, the company ICON Homes is nearing completion on a 100-unit development called The Genesis Collection at Wolf Ranch. As Reuters’s Evan Garcia reports, construction on the project is almost finished — and all it took was a 3D printer that’s around 45 feet long and weighs nearly five tons.

The 3D printer is used to essentially layer the concrete walls of the homes, while the foundations and roofs are installed in a more traditional manner. “[W]here there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot,” Connor Jenkins, a senior project manager at ICON Homes, told Reuters.

If these are intended to be the homes of the future — a theme that which meshes neatly with ICON Homes’ work with NASA — it’s worth noting that they’re also taking steps to reckon with the extreme weather of the future. Earlier this year, an announcement on ICON Homes’ website touted their designs being tested for resistance to fires, tornadoes and hurricanes.

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The houses in the Genesis Collection start at $430,000 and are between 1,500 and 2,100 square feet in size. These aren’t the only developments ICON is working on. They’re also scheduled to break ground this year on El Cosmico, a development in Marfa that will draw some design inspiration from ICON Homes’ work with NASA. Is this the future of residential construction? The lived experience of these houses’ owners in the coming years will tell us plenty.