ICON and Lake Flato build 3D-printed House Zero in Austin

[Celerity]

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/03/04/icon-lake-flato-3d-printed-house-zero-austin/





Construction technology outfit ICON and architecture studio Lake Flato have completed a 3D-printed, modern ranch-style home in Austin to be displayed during the SXSW festival. ICON, the company to first sell ready-to-own 3D homes in the US, worked with San Antonio and Austin-based architecture studio Lake Flato to design House Zero.





The home is sited in a single-family residential neighbourhood in East Austin, Texas, and was built using ICON's Vulcan construction system. The system uses 3D printing, a technology that dispenses layers of material mechanically based on a computer program, to lay the walls of the 2,000-square-foot (186-square-metre) home. The 3D-printed wall aspects took 10 days to print. "House Zero is ground zero for the emergence of entirely new design languages and architectural vernaculars that will use robotic construction to deliver the things we need most from our housing: comfort, beauty, dignity, sustainability, attainability, and hope," said Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of ICON, in a release.





Reinforced by steel, the walls are printed with a proprietary material ICON calls Lavacrete – a cement-like substance that is air-tight while also providing increased insulation. "We let the Lavacrete lead the way," Ashley Heeren, associate architect for Lake Flato, told Dezeen. "We could then use other materials in ways that were not only honest to their nature but also supported and complemented the concrete".





"While the organic nature of the 3D-printed concrete and curved walls are new design languages for us, House Zero was still entirely in line with the natural connections we seek in our architecture," said Heeren continued. "The home expresses our shared passions for craft and performance in an inviting and comfortable family home constructed through a totally new way of building".

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[BComplex]

1. Thanks for this Celerity! Now if they can start using melted down computers

and electronics and other pollution heavy materials, recycled and repurposed somehow, to make these houses, we might start turning this planet away from all the waste we're creating!

But this is still a good start!