A few years ago I was up at the MIT Media Lab, where I have been on the advisory board, and met a bunch of faculty members. The one that blew me away was a woman who was building a 3D printer that could “print” office buildings. That really stuck with me.
So with that in the back of my mind, the Gotham Gal and I were in a bar in Palm Springs last night and we bumped into a couple people we kind of knew, one of them an AVC reader named Brett Hagler, and we heard the story of a house being 3D printed in Austin Texas during the recent SXSW conference.
Brett’s non-profit New Story (crowdfunding to finance and build homes in the developing world) and a robotics construction company called Icon collaborated to build an inhabitable 800 square foot home in Austin Texas in less than 24 hours.
These two companies think they can get the construction costs below $4,000 for a 3D printed home. That’s kind of amazing and disruptive in a whole bunch of ways.
It is exciting to see 3D printing technology continue to grow and scale into new and important sectors, like construction and real estate.
