How to Get 3D Printed Home for $10,000
A start-up company unveils its plan to print affordable 3D houses in a bid to help the millions of homeless people around the world.
According to a 2017 report from World Resources Institute's Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, at least 1.2 billion people around the world do not have shelter. Austin-based start-up ICON wants to change that.
The company announced at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals that with its new 3D printing technology, it hopes to ease the construction of new houses and make it much more affordable.
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ICON showed that it has developed an impressive new method where it can build houses in just 12 to 24 hours, a great fraction of the time needed to build a 650-square-foot house out of cement when using the traditional way. The house, which features a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and even a porch, is priced at $10,000.
"It's much cheaper than the typical American home," said Jason Ballard, one of ICON's three founders. ICON hopes to still bring that cost down to as low as $4,000.
The house was built by first creating a schematic of the house and the location. This will then be placed into a computer, which will tell a massive Vulcan printer how and where to place the cement.
ICON, which partnered with non-profit international housing solutions organization New Story, hopes to kick off the project by building 100 houses for the homeless in El Salvador. "We have been building homes for communities in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia," Alexandria Lafci, co-founder of New Story, said in a statement.
Before going all out though, ICON hopes to test out the practicality of the building by trying it out as an office. "We are going to install air quality monitors. How does it look, and how does it smell?" Ballard explained. He added that the Vulcan printer can build a house as big as 800 square feet. The average New York apartment is 866 square feet.
