Are We Thinking About 3D-Printed Housing All Wrong?

In 2018, Texas-based 3D-printing company ICON collaborated with housing nonprofit New Story to unveil the Chicon House, the first permitted 3D-printed home in the United States, at Austin’s SXSW festival. The charmingly decorated, 350-square-foot home was printed in less than 48 hours for around $10,000. The construction of its walls—a continuous spurt of concrete layering on top of itself—was undeniably hypnotic.

"Our mission is to make dignified housing accessible to everyone, everywhere," said Jason Ballard, the cofounder and CEO of ICON, now among the most prominent 3D-printing companies in America, in an interview on 60 Minutes. A year later, ICON built a welcome center and six tiny homes within Community First! Village, a neighborhood in East Austin that provides permanent housing for people who have experienced chronic homelessness. "I think anyone who sees [the welcome center] will feel like this is a future they can get behind," Ballard told Dwell in 2019.

An exciting new technology, it seemed, had come to the rescue as a solution to the affordable housing crises plaguing the 21st century (though the first 3D-printed home was built in 1939, the concept gained traction in 1995). Advocates have made claims that 3D printing can increase the building stock in a meaningful way by reducing costs, labor hours, and material waste—about four tons less than the amount typically left over from building an American home—and in turn minimize the outsize carbon footprint associated with home building. Several companies have since developed materials with a smaller carbon footprint than concrete; the Italian firm Mario Cucinella Architects, for instance, has developed 3D-printed homes entirely composed of local raw earth.

Last year, ICON launched Initiative 99, a global architecture competition to reimagine affordable housing by designing homes that could be built for $99,000 or less with the company’s 3D-printed construction technology. Six winners and ten honorable mentions received shares of the $1 million fund courtesy of Wells Fargo—a small part of the $2.1 billion Wells Fargo has paid to settle charges related to its role in the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, which led in part to the present-day affordable housing crisis—and ICON will reportedly build a selection of the winning designs at various sites around the world.

Yet some who are producing 3D-printed housing believe there is reason to doubt that the on-the-ground method adopted by ICON and similar for-profit companies (including Apis Cor, Alquist 3D, and Mighty Buildings) is truly on its way to becoming the standard for affordable housing. Instead, they suggest using the technology to prefabricate components off-site that can be quickly and easily be put together in different configurations.

The construction industry is reluctant to change its methods so long as it has profitable arrangements with other related industries, like carpentry and masonry. And on-site 3D printing is not currently suited to create the high-density, multiunit housing necessary for walkable communities and sustainable land use. Given the current height limitations of 3D printing (the tallest at present stands at a mere three stories), the technique has largely been used as a new way of doing an old thing: developing the standalone suburban homes that have historically made Americans dependent on automobiles and automobile infrastructure.

And if the suburbs of Austin isn’t remote enough from the urban centers where the affordable housing crisis is most apparent, ICON has additionally set its sights on outer space. Using a $57 million contract from NASA, the company’s Austin headquarters has developed a lunar simulation room and environmental vacuum chambers aimed at "further[ing] the efforts of NASA as well as commercial organizations to establish a sustained lunar presence" on the moon. Somehow, 3D printing has reinvigorated the priorities of 1950s America: suburban development, moon colonization, and the downplay of class inequality.

This is not to say, however, that 3D-printing, which is still in its experimental phase, can’t be used to mitigate the affordable housing crisis. As construction costs continue to mount—according to the 2021-2025 California Construction Cost Index, they have increased by as much as nine percent every year between 2021 and 2024—the cost-cutting technology should be taken seriously. "Affordability puts pressure on how these new technologies will roll out," says Karl Daubmann, the dean of architecture and design at Lawrence Technological University. "Residential construction in the U.S. has been optimized for cost and minimal initial investment. At the same time, we see how unresilient some forms of construction and settlement (pattern and location) can be especially given recent hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires."

Daubmann’s own architecture firm, DAUB, is in the early stages of developing PLOP (Prototyping Lab for Offsite Prefab), a method that steers away from printing on-site to instead prefabricate large masonry units before delivering them and assembling them like Legos. This process could yield taller projects more quickly by producing their components within controlled environments. "In order to make this technology sustainable we are looking into the carbon footprint and lifecycle costing analysis of deploying this technology," says Daubmann. "We are hoping to create durable houses that minimize onsite labor costs and this balance will impact time, cost, and longevity."

Father-daughter duo Tom and Evelyn Woodman, who founded Citizen Robotics, a nonprofit construction-scale 3D-printing company, in 2020 to address the affordable housing crisis in Detroit, Michigan, have a similar goal. Among their first projects was a 1,000-square-foot 3D-printed home near their studio in Southwest Detroit—the first of its kind in the Midwest. "We reached a high energy efficiency level without trying," says Evelyn. The home, designed in collaboration with local architecture firm Develop Architecture, was assembled on site within a mere five days using the labor of two people.

Yet the entire process, Evelyn cautions, took a total of 15 months due to the relentless uphill battle with antiquated codes, policies, and practices. "When we started Citizen Robotics, we didn’t realize the complexities of the entire industry," says Woodman. "Small nonprofit construction start-ups don’t have the time, incentive, or money to invest in technological advancement at a scale commensurate with the affordable housing crisis."

Perhaps that’s why Citizen Robotics is currently less invested in making more homes than in educating young Detroiters through workshops that offer a combination of tech and policy literacy. "One of our little slogans is ‘made by humans with robots,’" says Woodman. "Robots are not coming in to save the day. It’s people who are interested in using technology to solve the many problems in front of us."

The workshops echo what Adam Greenfield espouses in his 2017 book Radical Technologies. Digital fabrication is not about finding new ways to do what we are currently doing; Instead, it aims to "[upend] every assumption the culture holds about how things are made, and who gets to make them." If 3D printing has any chance of correcting the mistakes of the past, it will need to be imagined less as a corporate cure-all and more as a community tool; less as a method for fabricating the largest-conceivable commodities whole cloth, and more as a method for addressing everyday repairs at a smaller, more human scale—like darning a sock or patching a pothole.

At the center of the Citizen Robotics studio is a large robotic arm on wheels, ready to be hitched to a truck and moved across Detroit to print anything from permeable pavers for mitigating storm water runoff to a courtyard bench or a single acoustically optimized wall. It may even be parked in front of a middle school to serve as an educational tool for the next generation. If 3D printing can be used "as the shiny object that gets people to imagine their own ways of working with new technology," as Woodman describes it, then it has the potential to inspire entire communities to address the harder conversations about everything from mutual aid to sustainability and adequate housing.

"We’re kind of detached from the question of whether 3D printing is going to be the next big thing," says Woodman. "Who cares? We need to use a tool to solve this problem. This is a tool we can all try out."  

Top photo provided by Alquist 3D.

Related Reading:

What It’s Really Like to Live in a 3D-Printed Home

Detroit’s First 3D-Printed Home Was Made by a Robot That Used to Build Cars

How ICON Is Building the $4,000 3D-Printed Homes of the Future