Home > News

The Latest Use for 3D Printing: $4000 Homes in 24 Hours

By Laura Tucker
The Latest Use for 3D Printing: $4000 Homes in 24 Hours Featured Image

Everyone needs a decent place to live. It doesn’t have to be a huge place, and it doesn’t have to be gorgeous accommodations. It just needs to be an adequate shelter to store your belongings, provide a place to cook your food and rest your head, and protect you from the weather.

An Austin-based startup has found a new way to use 3D printing, according to a report by the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. They’re using it to solve the housing crisis by creating homes for just $4000 that can be produced within 24 hours.

A New Kind of “Tiny House”

ICON has put together this process of using 3D printing to build a single-story 650-square-foot house. It’s built out of cement and takes between 12 to 24 hours. And that’s the whole house, not just the foundation. It’s a completely different idea for a “tiny house.”

news-3d-printing-house-cement

The company uses the Vulcan printer to create the entire home. Right now the cost is sitting around $10,000, but the plan is to get the cost down to around $4000 for each home. Minimal waste is created, and the cost of labor is greatly reduced.

The printer is also capable of printing a home that is 800 square feet, which puts it at around twice the size of a typical tiny house but around the average size of an apartment in New York.

The first model has been built in Austin. It has a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and a curved porch. Jason Ballard, one of ICON’s founders, will use it for an office. “We are going to install air quality monitors. How does it look, and how does it smell?” he explains.

SvM7jFZGAec maxresdefault

He notes that there are other companies that are printing homes and structures, “but they are printed in a warehouse, or they look like Yoda huts. For this venture to succeed, they have to be the best houses.” He believes using cement will help skeptics see the structure as sturdy. “I think if we were printing in plastic, we would encounter some issues.”

How They Plan to Use It

The plan is to create an entire community of these 3D homes, a total of 100, in El Salvador next year. ICON partnered with the non-profit New Story that has been contracted to provide international housing solutions.

“We have been building homes for communities in Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia,” reports Alexandria Lafci, New Story’s co-founder.

news-3d-printing-house-rooms

Once all the testing is done, the Vulcan printer will be moved to El Salvador to begin creating those 100 homes. Eventually they’d like to build these 3D homes in the United States as well, believing it could solve the housing shortage, while acknowledging labor unions might not to in favor of this plan.

And still, the plan is to maybe even take this much further, to build communities not of this world. “One of the big challenges is how are we going to create habitats in space,” Ballard explains. “You’re not going to open a two-by-four and open screws. It’s one of the more promising potential habitat technologies.”

Home Sweet Home?

Is this something you could live in? Could you live in a cement home created by a 3D printer? Or would you prefer to stick with a more traditional home? Let us know our thoughts on this new technology!

Image Credit: YouTube

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.