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3D printed house company


The Genesis Collection – ICON

Homes at Wolf Ranch

Built by ICON and Lennar, one of the nation’s leading homebuilders, and co-designed by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, the innovative community of one hundred 3D-printed homes feature eight floorplans, 24 elevations, and will be powered by the sun with rooftop solar panels.

03 Bedrooms | 02 Baths | 1,574 Sq Ft

This stylish single-story home located in the incredible community of Wolf Ranch has 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and boasts more than 1,500 square feet of living space, a rear patio and an open floor plan for entertaining. The primary suite sits off the living area, and includes a beautiful walk-in closet, a double vanity, a standalone tub and shower.

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03 Bedrooms | 02 Baths | 1,781 Sq Ft

The perfect home for entertaining, Genesis 02 has an open floor plan that allows you to see your guests or family across the kitchen, living and dining spaces. This spacious 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom single-story home features a large walk-in closet in the primary suite, as well as a double vanity, a standalone tub and shower.

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03 Bedrooms | 02 Baths | 2,014 Sq Ft

A private primary bedroom retreat anchors this home and provides a sanctuary with its own patio. The focal point of the home is the open kitchen, which connects to both the living and dining spaces—a host’s dream. The 3-bedroom, 2-bath home offers ample closet space, large windows and a spacious kitchen island.

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03 Bedrooms | 02 Baths | 1,977 Sq Ft

Genesis 04 is a 3-bedroom, 2-bath home with nearly 2,000 square feet of living space, in addition to a 385-square-foot outdoor patio. Large sliding doors off the living room allow you to bring the outdoors in. The primary bedroom offers a large walk-in closet.

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04 Bedrooms | 02 Baths | 1,993 Sq Ft

This 4-bedroom, 2-bathroom home is perfect for those looking for larger space. It boasts more than 2,000 square feet of living space and flex spaces that could be used for a home office—or even two. The primary suite sits towards the rear of the house, offering privacy for its occupants. The gorgeous en-suite bathroom features a large walk-in closet.

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03 Bedrooms | 02 Baths | 2,010 Sq Ft

Genesis 06 has an open-concept living room attached to a spacious patio, allowing for both indoor and outdoor entertaining. Large glass sliding doors allow the space to fill with natural light or close out the outside world. The home offers 2,000+ square feet of living space with an open-concept kitchen.

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04 Bedrooms | 03 Baths | 2,031 Sq Ft

Genesis 07 is a 4-bedroom, 2. 5-bath with ample living space for homeowners. The open kitchen sits between living and dining spaces, allowing for seamless transitions and entertaining.

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04 Bedrooms | 03 Baths | 2,112 Sq Ft

A 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom home, The Genesis 08, offers over 2,000 square feet of living space. The front door allows for side entry and greater privacy in the home. Upon entering the foyer, there is a separation between living and dwelling spaces. This home offers a large, open kitchen and dining space with an adjacent living room and access to the outdoors.

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Reservations Begin 2023

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Technology – ICON

Vulcan Construction System

Meet Vulcan
Our Home-Sized
3D Printer

Designed and engineered from the ground up for volume 3D printing of homes with precision and speed.

The Vulcan Construction System

Designed and engineered from the ground up for volume 3D printing of homes with precision and speed.

Total Width 46.5 feet
Total Height 15.5 feet
Weight 9500 lbs
Voltage 230/240 V residential single phase
Print Height 10.5 feet
Print Width 38 feet
Print Length Infinite
Print Speed 5-10" /sec
Material Mixing & Pumping Magma System
Material Input Lavacrete

Vulcan Construction System

Meet Vulcan
Our Home-Sized
3D Printer

Designed and engineered from the ground up for volume 3D printing of homes with precision and speed.

Vulcan Construction System

Print Suite

Robotics + Software + Materials

The Vulcan construction system is a combination of hardware, materials, and software to construct homes and large-scale structures. Every part of the system has been designed, engineered, and built from the ground up at ICON to build the highest quality homes possible.

The Vulcan construction system is comprised of the Vulcan printer and the Magma portable mixing unit that prepares ICON’s proprietary building material, Lavacrete, for printing. All of this hardware is driven by our BuildOS software suite. BuildOS generates and prepares architecture for printing, then controls the robotic hardware on-site to turn digital plans into physical homes.

Vulcan is a large-scale, construction 3D-printer that prints entire homes on location. The printer is designed to be rapidly transported to build sites, then moved quickly from site to site. Vulcan prints directly on the ground or a poured slab.

A portable factory that feeds a Vulcan printer on location. Magma ingests dry Lavacrete, hydrates, and then adjusts the formula in real time based on the conditions at the build site itself. Once material is mixed, Magma pumps the Lavacrete to Vulcan for printing.

Lavacrete is a proprietary material created by ICON’s material science team to be both highly printable and incredibly strong. Lavacrete has gone through rigorous testing and development yielding an extremely durable building material.

A collection of software products, BuildOS creates digital architecture and then helps control the robots that turn those designs into physical buildings. BuildOS software spans multiple device interfaces to accelerate construction through high-precision, parametric architecture for ICON’s construction operations.

Vulcan

Robotic Construction

The Vulcan is our third generation, large-scale 3D-printer system for additive construction. The current Vulcan system is 1.5x larger, 2x faster than our previous generation and capable of printing homes and structures up to 3,000 square feet without relocation. The Vulcan can produce resilient, single-story homes faster than conventional methods and with less waste and more design freedom.

  • Vulcan Size 15'-6" x 46'-6"
  • Build Volume 10'-6" x 38' x 100'

Magma

Mix Master

Magma is a smart, portable factory that feeds a Vulcan printer with material to print a home. Intelligent and working in perfect sync with a Vulcan printer on-site, Magma takes the guesswork out of complex, high-performance cementitious material.

The Magma system feeds Vulcan printers with ICON’s advanced cement-based material, Lavacrete. Using any of ICON’s proprietary Lavacrete blends, the Magma system mixes Lavacrete, additives, and water automatically, depending on current site weather conditions, then supplies the ready-to-print Lavacrete to the Vulcan. Think of Magma as an extremely smart print cartridge, super-sized for home construction.

Weather and environmentally aware, a Magma unit adjusts & mixes ICON’s Lavacrete material in real time for the best possible material.

Build OS

Digital Native

ICON’s digital operating system controls every aspect of print operations via an intuitive, simple, and beautiful user interface.

The BuildOS system translates floor plans into print jobs and then directs both Vulcan and Magma, using real-time data down to the millisecond to produce the highest quality printed structures in the world.

From its powerful CAD and print planning to enable machine learning and predictive analytics for Vulcan robots, this advanced software brings construction into the 21st century.

ICON’s digital operating system controls every aspect of print operations via an intuitive, simple, and beautiful user interface.

The BuildOS system translates floor plans into print jobs and then directs both Vulcan and Magma, using real-time data down to the millisecond to produce the highest quality printed structures in the world.

From its powerful CAD and print planning to enable machine learning and predictive analytics for Vulcan robots, this advanced software brings construction into the 21st century.

Materials

Rock Solid
Science

Materials

Rock Solid
Science

ICON’s Lavacrete can be printed at high speeds while retaining form, enabling homes to be built faster while keeping construction projects on schedule and on budget. Lavacrete, a high-strength concrete, boasts a compressive strength of 2,000 - 3,500 psi. In structural tests, ICON's wall system exceeded building code design requirements by more than 350%.

ICON’s Lavacrete can be printed at high speeds while retaining form, enabling homes to be built faster while keeping construction projects on schedule and on budget. Lavacrete, a high-strength concrete, boasts a compressive strength of 2,000 - 3,500 psi. In structural tests, ICON's wall system exceeded building code design requirements by more than 350%.

Construction 3D printing is waiting for a breakthrough The first construction projects using this technology appeared only in 2014. We are talking, first of all, about the so-called small architectural forms (benches, flower beds, fences). They never even dreamed about building houses. But already in 2015, the Russian startup Apis Cor made a splash - it printed a whole house in the Moscow region. Since then, news about new 3D printed houses has periodically appeared.

However, despite the fact that the technology proved to be very promising in terms of the speed of construction of housing and the reduction in the cost of construction, no mass implementation followed.

Construction is the world's number one market. And, if many technological innovations are being introduced in the field of high-rise construction, then little has changed in the field of low-rise construction over the past decades. The last 30 years have seen the availability of the Internet, mobile phones, mobile internet, robotics taken to a new level, etc., but when you get to a house construction site, you are unlikely to find many technological innovations. Automation is practically non-existent, and manual labor prevails. 2020 was a test of strength for the whole world, and also led to the highest level of inflation, which, first of all, hit the construction market, there was a dramatic change in prices for metals, cement, wood and much more.

This Internet meme shows what happened to the cost of building materials in just a year. And the process is still going on. At the same time, there is a serious rise in the cost of labor, and there is an acute shortage of it. All this leads to a sharp rise in the cost of building houses. No matter how strange it may sound, statistics show that the growth of automation does not occur when everything is fine, but precisely in crisis situations, during increased competition, reduced demand and the need to urgently look for new technologies to increase production efficiency. So it happened this time, and after some stagnation, construction 3D printing received a new impetus for development.

Preparing to write an article, I turned to the founder of Arkon - Boris Kozlov y. Arkon was established in 2020 and is engaged in the production of construction 3D printers, both a workshop type for creating prefabs (prefabricated houses) and a portal one capable of printing a two-story house. I asked Boris the key, in my opinion, question:

- Construction 3D printing appeared in 2014, but no mass introduction of this technology followed in 7-8 years. Why do you think this happened, and why is there a surge of new projects right now?

- It seems to me that the reason is the snowball effect. The technology had to mature, grow from a hypothesis to a pilot implementation, and finally to commercialization and scaling (what is happening now). In addition, it should be borne in mind that construction is one of the most conservative industries, where, unlike even aviation and the automotive industry, there is still an extremely low introduction of digital solutions and automation in the field of the production process itself - the construction itself. The issue of regulation and certification also plays an important role - this process is long and creates an additional lag.

In 2014-2016 the first samples of building 3D printers and prototypes of printed buildings appeared. The concepts of various form factors of construction 3D printers and types of printing materials were tested.

In 2017-2018 in the world, the first notable investments were made in a number of construction 3D printing start-ups. Further, by 2020, these investments "rolled" in the form of reaching a certain level of technology maturity - the first commercial products (3D printers and houses) appeared.

Finally, in 2020-2022 it became clear that the hypotheses of the effectiveness of construction 3D printing were justified (cheaper, faster, more environmentally friendly), and large investments began in the industry. A striking example is the investment of GE (the French division of General Electric) in the Danish COBOD or the achievement of a capitalization of $ 2 billion by the American company ICON.

In 2022-2023 over 1,000 buildings will be printed worldwide already, scaling from single buildings/pilot projects to entire villages and major infrastructure/reinforced concrete implementations. In addition, in a number of countries, by now, a regulatory framework has been created or is being actively created for the introduction of additive technologies in the construction industry.

Thus, I believe that the specified time period is a fairly natural cycle of technology development, which is likely to experience exponential growth in the next decade.

According to ResearchAndMarket report, the global construction 3D printing market is valued at USD 354.3 million in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 11068.1 million by 2027, growing by 99.04%.

Various market processes affect the prices and behavior of participants in the global 3D construction printing market. They create price signals that are the result of changes in the demand and supply curves for a product or service. They can be associated with both macroeconomic and microeconomic factors. Even human emotions can also drive decisions, influence the market, and create price signals.

Now let's take a quick look at what the construction 3D printer is. Without delving too deeply into the technology, we can say that construction 3D printers are very similar to classic FDM/FFF printers that print with plastic, but instead of plastic, the material here is a cement mixture, which is fed directly into the nozzle and forms an object by layer-by-layer overlay. Printers are also portal, on the basis of a flying boom, with a robotic arm.

Pictured left is a construction printer based on a boom. The figure on the right is a gantry construction 3D printer

In the figure above, a construction 3D printer in the form of a robot arm installed on a mobile platform.

Everything changed completely when, in the summer of 2021, the American company ICON, which was trying to introduce 3D printing into the construction of various auxiliary facilities, signed a contract with one of the largest American developers, Lennar, to build a village of 100 houses in Texas and immediately became a unicorn , having received 200 million dollars of investments from several investment funds.

Pictured is a 3D printed house in Austin, Texas. A 3D printed house in Austin, Texas.

At the same time, the Danish company COBOD, created by the world's largest construction formwork company PERRI, began selling its gantry 3D construction printers and participating in construction projects around the world. In the photo below, a modern two-story house built in Germany and a school building in Malawi, built in record time with a minimal budget.

Few things unite developed, developing and poor countries, everywhere their problems and tasks, but Affordable housing shortage is a global agenda . If in poor countries there is an acute problem with the increase in the number of homeless people due to a lack of housing, as such, then in developing countries it is necessary to dramatically accelerate the number of new housing being built to meet the needs of a growing population. In developed countries, the problem is primarily in the cost of housing, which has risen in price to such an extent that it has become practically inaccessible to young people. And with the simultaneous increase in life expectancy in these countries, this problem is only getting worse.

At the same time, the trend towards "green agenda " is developing, reducing CO2 emissions, building with more environmentally friendly materials, etc. But, unfortunately, so far the construction industry is the absolute leader in CO2 emissions, as well as in the amount of garbage that each construction site leaves behind. This is not to say that construction 3D printing solves all these problems, but at least it is moving in the right direction. Let's look at this with a few illustrative examples.

3D printed walls.

Today, when we talk about 3D printing houses, we are talking about printing walls. Everything else (foundation, windows, doors, ceilings and roof) is done in the traditional way. 3D printed walls are built as fixed formwork, which significantly saves the amount of cement used , and this, in turn, reduces the cost of construction and reduces the environmental impact of cement production. In addition, with this method of construction, no additional waste is produced, the strength of the structure does not suffer. It can be reinforced, as shown in the photo on the left, and engineering communications can be immediately laid, as shown in the photo on the right, which also affects the final speed of the construction of the object. At the same time, the total weight of the structure is reduced, the remaining cavities can be filled with lightweight foam concrete, insulation, straw or any other available material. Such a lightweight design can use a lighter foundation. The construction method itself is more economical in terms of material, and therefore environmentally friendly.

Eco-concrete with the addition of polymers is being actively developed, the production of which reduces CO2 emissions from 30% to 100%. The Apis Cor company mentioned at the beginning of the article, which built a house in the suburbs in 2015, is now based in hot Florida, plans to start using this material in its projects.

Another startup from Russia, Mighty Buildings, headquartered in California, initially relied on a polymer with the addition of mineral chips. And while the company doesn't build entire homes, it only makes wall panels, it has won numerous design awards, as well as a $400 million valuation in several investment rounds.

As a result, with a rough calculation, we can say that the total savings on the construction of walls can reach 30%, and the total cost of the house can be reduced by 10%. This is true for houses designed for conventional construction. And if you initially design with 3D printing, you can improve this ratio by optimizing the laying of communications, the ability to immediately print interior walls, bookmark niches for bathrooms, fireplaces, built-in wardrobes and kitchens, as was done in the house built by COBOD in Germany.

"There are spots on the sun." Despite all the advantages of construction 3D printing, has several significant disadvantages of . The main one is layering, which cannot be avoided at the current level of technology development.

The photo above shows the layering of the 3D printed walls.

This task can be worked in several directions:

  1. Ribbed walls can be plastered, painted and played with as a design element. That's how ICON does it in the US, for example their latest project House Zero is done that way and has won a number of design awards.

3D printed House Zero in the USA, built by ICON.

  1. Use special "shutters" on the print head that allow smooth layers, as COBOD and other manufacturers do. The photo below shows that this does not ensure the complete absence of layering.

  1. Fully sand the surface to get the usual smooth wall for plastering, painting, wallpapering or other finishing. It is possible, but it will require huge labor costs, which can reduce the overall efficiency of using 3D printing.

Pictured above is a 3D printed wall sanded smooth.

The second problem is the required temperature. Ideally, printing should take place at temperatures between +5C° and +30C°. Humidity is also important. Using additives, you can push these boundaries, but not indefinitely. At strong sub-zero temperatures, printing will be possible in the field only if the construction site is covered with a dome and the required temperature is reached inside with the help of heat guns. In conditions of intense heat, it is preferable to print at night. Another solution could be to print the wall panels in the shop and assemble them on site. Of course, each of these decisions will have a negative impact on the economic efficiency of the project.

Building 3D printing can be useful not only for the construction of houses . With its help, you can solve many other problems, and there its disadvantages will not matter. For example, the American concern GE uses COBOD printers to build towers for wind turbines in the shop. Ribbed surface and temperature restrictions in this case do not play any role. Construction takes place in the shop, after which the object is transported to the installation site.

3D printed wind tower. 3D printed wind tower.

Construction 3D printing, or, as it is also called, additive construction, has just appeared, and I want to believe in its bright future. There are many prerequisites for this, but a lot still needs to be done for success. First of all, it is necessary to develop principles for designing houses for building 3D printing. Then it is necessary to attract top architects to create landmark projects, which can be followed by the mass introduction of a new and very promising technology. Construction 3D printing could help solve the global housing shortage and bring more automation to other areas of construction.

Alexander Kornveits

Expert in the field of additive technologies and 3D printing, head of Tsvetnoy Mir

How much does a house printed on a 3D printer cost?

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