Chris Tomlinson: First complete 3D-printed home can withstand hurricanes ?— and it looks good, too

Hurricanes taught Jason Ballard that conventional U.S. homes are fatally fragile when he was a child growing up in the Gulf Coast town of Orange, near the Louisiana border. Classes in conservation at Texas A&M taught Ballard that building construction produces more landfill debris, consumes more water and wastes more energy than any other industry. At the SXSW technology conference in Austin, Ballard taught visitors how a home designed to be 3-D printed can resist what climate change can throw at it, minimize waste and inefficiency, and still look good.

“I looked at everything: zip panels, shipping container houses, prefab houses, modular houses, probably the weirdest thing I looked at was architectural fungus, where you would, like, grow a house,” he told me. “When I got to 3-D printing and robotic construction more broadly, it was the only thing that worked on the spreadsheet of affordability, scalability, sustainability, beauty and dignity.” Ballard, founder and CEO of ICON Technology Inc., decided to scale up the desktop 3-D printers that made toys from plastic a decade ago. He’s built a device 15.5 feet high and 46.5 feet wide capable of laying down two-inch-thick layers of concrete to construct a 3,000 square foot building. His company has completed dozens of buildings, ranging from small homes to military barracks to a dwelling used by NASA to test the feasibility of living on Mars. But the home unveiled in Austin is the first structure explicitly designed to take full advantage of robotic construction. “Robotically built houses, 3-D printed houses want to be very different,” Ballard said. “If you just carbon copy or sort of appropriate the architectural forms and designs of contemporary houses, you end up appropriating a lot of their problems as well.”