ICON, the office that pioneered large-scale 3D printing, has announced a new residential development of 3D-printed homes to take shape at Wimberley Springs, in Texas, United States. The complex, comprising 8 single-family homes, features designs from ICON’s CODEX Digital Architecture Catalog. The houses, currently under construction and available for sale, leverage ICON’s robotic technologies to create an energy-efficient, low-carbon construction process.
The new development offers homebuyers the opportunity to choose from 4 different floor plans from the AlphaBeta and TextNext collections. The first collection represents ICON’s more spacious designs, featuring four to five bedrooms and 2,800 to 4,000 square feet. The TexNext prototypes have been developed in collaboration with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and adapted to integrate into the area’s context and architectural heritage.
The homes designed for Wimberley Springs aim for a high thermal performance owing to the concrete construction, which provides thermal mass that allows for a slow transfer of heat between the interior and exterior of the home, thus limiting the temperature variation in the interior spaces. To lower the carbon footprint of the new development, ICON employs its proprietary low-carbon material CarbonX. This, paired with the robotic construction method, ensures lower material use and higher energy efficiency compared to standard newly-built homes. according to the designers. Additionally, the 3D-printed wall system has been optimized to withstand speeds of up to 250 mph.
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BIG, ICON, and Lennar Complete the First 3D-Printed Model House at the Wolf Ranch Community in Austin, TexasThe homes are sold fully equipped with smart home technologies to further optimize operational energy use. Located in the Wimberley Springs neighborhood, three miles from the Wimberley town center and 40 miles south of Austin, the new residential development aims to offer residents high-performance energy-efficient homes that take advantage of emerging building technologies while developing a comfortable neighborhood in close connection to nature.
Continuing in their effort to explore the potential of 3D-printing, ICON has launched Initiative 99, an open competition promoting affordable home designs that can be built for under $99,000 employing 3D-printing robotics. In the Open Category, three winners have emerged: architecture office For Everyday.Life (FEL) has proposed designs for community living in Puerto Rico, MTspace Studio has proposed a robust flood-resistant design, in response to the housing crisis in New Zealand’s flood zones, while Beta Realities has developed the “Collective Parts” initiative, a design and technology platform for enabling the construction of affordable 3D-printed housing.
