Jody Serrano
Editor in chiefEditor in Chief at Xataka On. Before joining Webedia, I was a tech reporter at Gizmodo and The Messenger. While I've covered all sorts of things related to technology, I'm specialized in writing about social media, Internet culture, Twitch, and streamers.
In recent years, the 3D printing boom has shown us that anything is possible. From toys and tools to medical devices, you can basically print anything—even 2,000-square-foot homes.
Hello, Vulcan. At the Wolf’s Ranch community in Georgetown, a city about 30 minutes away from the Texas capital, most of the home builders aren’t human. In fact, they’re actually robots—3D-printing robots, to be exact. One of them, the Vulcan, is more than 45 feet wide and weighs 4.75 tons.
It makes sense. The Vulcan isn’t building small-scale projects, but rather 3D printing homes. According to Reuters, the Vulcan takes a base mix of concrete powder, water, and sand and prints out a home through its nozzle as if it were toothpaste.
"It brings a lot of efficiency to the trade market," Conner Jenkins, a senior project manager at Icon, the company behind the Vulcan, said. "So, where there were maybe five different crews coming in to build a wall system, we now have one crew and one robot."
The world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood. Icon is an AI and robotics company that uses 3D printing to build homes quickly and at a lower cost. Two years ago, Icon partnered with Lennar, the second-largest homebuilder in the country, to construct 100 3D-printed homes. The project, Wolf’s Ranch, is now the world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood.
While the initial costs to build the community were slightly higher than expected, Lennar says it’s seen its costs decrease dramatically. Unlike human workers, Icon’s machines operate 24 hours a day. Each printer can do the work of more than 12 construction workers.
By its second year of construction at Wolf’s Ranch, Icon was using 11 machines and printing out two homes per week.
“We’ve seen our costs go down by half. We’ve seen our cycle time go down by half,” Stuart Miller, chairman and co-CEO of Lennar, told CNBC. “This is significant improvement in evolving a housing market that has the ability to change over time and being more adaptable and more functional in providing affordable and attainable housing for a broader swath of the market.”
What’s a 3D-printed home like? Although the homes at Wolf’s Ranch were made differently, they’re just like any other home, with a few differences. First off, all the walls have rounded edges because it’s simply how the printers work with concrete. It’s also important to recall that like other 3D printers, the Vulcan works by printing layers. As a result, the texture on the walls resembles wide corduroy. The foundation and the metal roofs on the homes are installed through traditional means.
Interestingly, the roofs on the homes are solar-powered via roofs made of metal, which include photovoltaic panels. Icon claims the roof is fire-resistant and that the materials used to make the walls are resistant to water, mold, and termites.
Not all homes in Wolf’s Ranch are the same. According to Icon’s website, there are eight models to choose from. The smallest is the Dyce, a 1,547-square-foot model with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The largest is the Klay, a 2,112-square-foot model with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. Prices range from $370,000 to $585,000.
Roughly 75% of the 100 homes available have already been sold, CNBC reported.
The next step: printing another neighborhood. Wolf’s Ranch will likely not be the world’s largest 3D-printed community for long. Icon is already planning to build another 200-home community with Lennar. Jason Ballard, Icon’s CEO, said he expects for the homes to cost even less and be completed faster.
“All the learnings about this technology need to happen at scale,” Ballard said. “The truth is in the field, not in the lab.”
Images | Icon
View 0 comments