ICON, a construction technologies company based in Austin, Texas, has a welcome center situated in a community housing complex for the chronically homeless.
What makes this new building special is that it’s the second 3D printed home in the United States.
But that’s just the start because the company’s Vulcan II 3D printer will soon start churning out houses at Community First! Village in Travis County, east of Austin. The community was set up in order to house homeless people from Austin.
Watch the video of the 3-D printed homes below.
[rumble video_id=v5libb domain_id=u7nb2]
Video credit: Rumble
Mobile Loaves & Fishes, the non-profit that set up Community First!, has partnered with ICON for this venture. Cielo Property Group contracted ICON to print the just-unveiled welcome center which is nearly 500 square feet. Cielo is also funding the printing for other homes in the community with six more homes expected soon.
The company said that in total, printing the house took less than 27 hours although the printing runs were spread out over several days.
It took Mobile Loaves & Fishes a lot of effort to get Phase I of Community First! Village off the ground ever since the idea was first proposed in 2004. But with 3D printing technology, they hope to get Phase II up and running quickly with 110 of the 3D-printed homes in the near future.
Alan Graham, founder, and CEO of Mobile Loaves & Fishes said, “That’s the beauty of the scalability of technology, that’s the beauty of the scalability of innovation. And then when you look at what it takes to actually build a house in a conventional way — a month — and be able to reduce that to days, it’s unbelievable.”
“This is going to create one of the most extraordinary movements in the United States of America,” he added emphatically.
In a press release, Graham continued: “ICON is pushing the envelope and is technologically laying out a new way of looking at how we build homes. Community First! Village is the perfect place on the planet to experiment with this approach. One of our desires is that this partnership with ICON will grow so deep that we’re able to leverage this technology to someday build all of our micro-homes in future phases of the Village.”
To those who have been homeless for some time, getting housing is life-changing, Graham explained.
“Because for the first time they feel connected into a community as opposed to being despised and outcast and put out on the furthest fringes of the community –like we treat our neighbors on our street corners now,” he said.
The first 3D-printed house in the US came out earlier this year when ICON presented the technology at South by Southwest, at Chicon Street in Austin.
Replaced!