The world’s largest 3D printed neighborhood is nearing completion in Texas

By Evan Garcia

GEORGETOWN, Texas (Reuters) – As with any desktop 3D printer, the Vulcan printer pipes layer by layer to build an object – except this printer is more than 45 feet wide, weighs 4.75 tons and prints homes .

This summer, ICON’s robotic printer is finishing the last 100 3D-printed homes in Wolf Ranch, a community in Georgetown, Texas, about 30 miles from Austin.

ICON began printing the walls of what it claims is the world’s largest 3D printed community in November 2022. Compared to traditional construction, the company claims that 3D printing homes is faster, cheaper, requires fewer workers and minimizes construction material waste.

“This brings a lot of efficiency to the commercial market,” said ICON Senior Project Manager Conner Jenkins. “So where there were maybe five different teams to build a wall system, now we have one team and one robot.”

After concrete powder, water, sand and other additives are mixed and pumped into the printer, a nozzle squeezes the concrete mixture like toothpaste onto a brush, building up layer by layer along a pre-programmed path that creates walls with corduroy effect.

Three- to four-bedroom single-story homes take about three weeks to finish printing, with the foundation and metal roofs installed traditionally.

Jenkins said concrete walls are designed to be resistant to water, mold, termites and extreme weather conditions.

Lawrence Nourzad, a 32-year-old director of business development, and his girlfriend Angela Hontas, a 29-year-old creative strategist, purchased a home in Wolf Ranch earlier this summer.

“It looks like a fortress,” Nourzad said, adding that he was confident it would be resistant to most tornadoes.

The walls also provide strong insulation from the Texas heat, the couple said, keeping the interior temperature low even when the air conditioning wasn’t on full blast.

However, there was something else the 3D-printed walls seemed to protect against: a solid wireless internet connection.

“Obviously, these walls are really strong and thick. And that’s what adds a lot of value to us as homeowners and keeps this thing really well insulated in the Texas summer, but the signal doesn’t transfer very well through these walls,” he said. Nourzad. .

To alleviate this problem, an ICON spokeswoman said most Wolf Ranch homeowners use mesh internet routers, which transmit a signal from multiple units placed in a home, rather than a traditional router that sends a signal from one device.

The 3D-printed homes in Wolf Ranch, called the “Genesis Collection” by developers, range in price from $450,000 to about $600,000. Developers said just over a quarter of the 100 homes have been sold.

ICON, which 3D printed its first home in Austin in 2018, hopes to one day take its technology to the Moon. NASA, as part of its Artemis Moon exploration program, contracted ICON to develop a building system capable of to build landing pads, shelters and other structures on the lunar surface.

(Reporting by Evan Garcia, editing by Rosalba O’Brien)