Not unlike the famous Sears Catalog which once listed prefabricated homes for sale to be delivered anywhere in America, Texas-based 3D printed home builder Icon, now offers a catalog.
Codex is the name of Icon’s collection of ready-to-print homes featuring more than 60 designs across five collections: Texas modern, fire resilient, storm resilient, affordable, and avant garde.
“The aim of Codex is to make high-design and high-performance residential architecture available at all price points,” says Icon. The company aims for Codex to be the most comprehensive digital catalog of buildable home designs in the world. Customers select preferred designs as a starting point for their dream home or, for builders, master planned communities and developments.
Icon will continue to introduce new collections and will also partner with and compensate architects all over the world to feature their designs. Three of the Codex collections available today were designed by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, the company Icon is teamed up with on a 60-acre community development in Marfa, Texas.
Complementing the new Codex catalog is Icon’s new AI system for designing and building homes. Dubbed Vitruvius, the ultimate goal of the platform is to take human and project inputs and produce robust architecture, plans, permit-ready designs, budgets, and schedules.
Vitruvius will help home buyers design homes and generate floor plans, interior renders, and exterior renders in minutes based on their own desires, budgets, and feedback, the company says. “By the end of this year, Vitruvius will progress all the way through schematic designs and in the following year Icon believes its AI architect will be able to produce full construction documents as well as permit-ready designs.”
“In the future, I believe nearly all construction will be done by robots, and nearly all construction-related information will be processed and managed by AI systems,” says Jason Ballard, Icon co-founder and CEO. “It is clear to me that this is the way to cut the cost and time of construction in half while making homes that are twice as good and more faithfully express the values and hopes of the people who live in them.”
Along with the new catalog and AI platform, Icon announced more developments, including a new suite of technologies and materials designed to further automate construction and reduce its carbon footprint.
“This is the moment we’ve really been working for these past six years,” says Ballard. “When we launched the company and the first permitted 3D printed house in 2018 during SXSW, we set out to both decrease the cost and increase the quality of building instead of choosing one or the other. We didn’t want to just be the best at 3D printing, we wanted to be the best at building, period.”
The company’s new robotic printer enables multistory construction because of its large robotic arm architecture in contrast to Icon’s other home printer. Called Phoenix, the construction 3D printer introduces the capability of printing an entire building enclosure including foundations and roof structures, not just walls and some internal features. By increasing speed and size and decreasing setup time and the number of required operators, the company says, this advanced robotic system will reduce printing costs by half.
Projects using Phoenix will be priced per square foot starting at $25/square foot for wall systems or $80/square foot including foundation and roof. This cost to build is lower than the most recent publicly available data for conventional construction of wall systems, according to Icon. “This wall system cost would represent a savings of up to $25,000 for the average American home versus conventional construction,” it says. The first engineering prototype of Phoenix has completed a 27-foot-tall architectural demonstration structure, now on display in Austin.
Icon has always 3D printed with proprietary materials and now introduces a new low-carbon extrudable concrete formula called CarbonX. A white paper co-authored with the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, entitled “Reducing carbon emissions in the built environment: A case study in 3D-printed homes”, features a case study of 3D printed homes built with CarbonX showing that the embodied and operational impacts of 3D printed homes are lower than stick-framed construction.
CarbonX will become available in April 2024 for all construction 3D printers, not just Icon machines. The company says future formulations of CarbonX are already in development to reduce carbon footprint even further and are expected to be announced in the coming year.
Icon has several completed home projects under its belt with many more underway.
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