A major home builder is teaming with a Texas startup to create a community of 100 3-D printed homes near Austin, gearing up for what would be by far the biggest development of this type of housing in the U.S.
Lennar Corp. and construction-technology firm Icon are poised to start building at a site in the Austin metro area. While Icon and others have built 3-D printed housing before, this effort will test the technology’s ability to churn out homes and generate buyer demand on a much larger scale.
If 3-D printing succeeds at this more ambitious level, it could offer a response to America’s chronic shortage of homes for sale, especially in the affordable price range, writes The Wall Street Journal (Oct.27, 2021). Mortgage-finance company Freddie Mac estimated that the national deficit of single-family homes stood at 3.8 million units at the end of 2020.
The vast majority of newly built single-family homes in the U.S. are constructed on-site and framed in wood using traditional construction methods. Icon’s 3-D printed houses use concrete framing instead. Its 15.5-foot-tall printers can build the exterior and interior wall system for a 2,000-square-foot, one-story house in a week. The printer squeezes out concrete in layers, like toothpaste out of a tube. The machines can print curved walls, allowing for more creative house designs.
Lennar will complete the houses using traditional construction methods. The week it takes Icon to print a wall system is about the same amount of time it takes to frame and drywall a home using traditional construction methods, but Lennar plans to speed up that process in the future. 3-D printed homes can also be built more cheaply and with less waste compared with typical newly built houses. Icon requires only three workers on-site when printing a wall system, replacing as many as 6 to 12 framers and drywall installers needed for conventional construction.
Classroom discussion questions:
- What are the advantages of 3-D printed home construction?
- The disadvantages?