3D Printed Homes Entering Mass Production - 2023 Update

check this out y'all this is super cool not only that this house that I'm in is one of 99 other houses in a hundred homes being printed here by icon this is a Lennar community in Georgetown Texas just north of Austin Texas where I live super cool we're gonna get into all the nerdy details today's build show from this icon Community let's get going all right guys Connor senior PM with icon dude this is a mind blower as a guy's been in construction his whole career but has done nothing but wood framing this house behind me the fact that it was printed is crazy and not only that you're putting the whole Community there's like seven printers on site right seven total that's right more to come so we're bringing out as many as we can holy cow this is the first one that's that you printed though and is the furthest along construction that's right why don't we walk these guys through the kind of process and actually what it looks like so first off all these houses are single story houses right yep so all these walls are load-bearing no interior partitions everything's concrete everything's concrete interior exterior walls our exterior walls are a little different than our interior so we have three beads on our exterior walls and two on our interior got it um we we also start at the slab and print on a slope around the perimeter of the slab so this helps us with water egress that's smart so you've got got like a dry like a uh Stone Legend a brick ledge yeah like a brick ledge but we're sloping it that that lets us print on it easier I love it that makes a lot of sense so water were to migrate in there somehow that's right it's going to hit a backstop plus it's got some slope to migrate out yep it hits the slope um we actually don't have uh weeps we don't need them okay but if if water would migrate out in the very unlikely event that water got in our wall sure it would migrate out and then garages are printed as well and then am I seeing a steel header across there it is a steel header yep it's bearing the load it's a steel plate it's got a fin on top of it and it Bears the load of the beads above it so it spans this whole opening that's wild yep and then these walls on the outside nothing's going on top of these right like this is the finished concrete we're painting them you're going to paint them okay I'm gonna paint them no no other finish though we want to we want to show off the beads clients like them uh we like them so uh we'll we'll paint them so we can do different colors and things like that and add a little more more moisture protection but okay but that's really bad yeah that's it and then where you've got punched openings you know you got a front door here it looks like you've put a pressured buck in just like you would with an ICF house that's right with a four concrete wall yeah so the initiative right now is to get our wall system to a place that our trade partners are used to building around right so when you slap in your window your exterior door even your roof trusses they're really not doing anything different and so the the magic of printing with with additive manufacturing is that we can design these jams however they need to be designed so we've designed them to accept this uh this buck so that the door will sit exactly in the plane that we want it to sit got it and this looks like just a regular 2x4 wall basically it made it out of pressure treated that you put some special caulking or foam in to seal it here that's it and then I love how what I've seen in the past as you guys don't do necessarily caulking on the outside for for prettiness I mean one of the cool things about this this wall is that it's not perfect right that there's some Improv infections and then when you walk in the first thing I'm noticing is I don't remember seeing these in past projects you've got like a I don't know a piece of u-shaped metal that's yep that's almost acting like a little header for the electrical that's right that's right it's a what we call an electrical sleeve so okay it is the this is the first project we're using it on um I like that it is designed to hold the weight so we'll as we print cut out the gap for the opening install this sleeve it's got little tabs in it to hold it in place and then the electricians can come and install their metal rough-in box that they'll attach MC to the back of MC cable that's right which is a shielded cable that's right yep um and then they're Off to the Races and you'll notice I'll uh I'll speak to the benefits of the wall system these are all pre-located right so your electrician isn't spending a day with the tape measure and a pencil figuring out they're all done it's done all he knows is there's a there's an electrical right here and then there's probably a double gang switch and we're good slap it in now how do they get the wires in there are these top plates open or are they closed or what's going on with that yeah because our walls are so um Precision made our top plate needs to replicate that for a couple of reasons number one um our top plates are acting as a reveal so you'll actually see a gap between the ceiling and our walls will paint it but we want the ceiling the architect big The Arc Ingles group wants that ceiling and it is Big design and they want it to float over the walls and so um we want that that top plate to replicate our wall now the other reason is for what you're speaking to so we need the top plate on to install the trusses so it's bearing the weight of those trusses and we need to the metal roof on for the insulation and so we've created this piece of blocking on the outside there's a gap that you can get into our wall install all the MEP rough in the insulation add the blocking and then liquid flash it and you're good to go gotcha so have these walls these walls then haven't been insulated yet they'll get insulated after the fact they have not right because we're looking at open air and so we want to protect our insulation from the from the elements got it okay and it's cool to see just a little bit of wood framing yeah so will there be some drywall on on the inside of this house or not really ceiling will be the only drywall okay um nowhere else right so even here um it'll be your door trim right so we've again just like exterior and what we do like um it's Minor Details yeah I'm sorry yeah that's just a tiny little I'm lying to you they're they're excited yeah there's drywall above the headers we were playing with the material actually we were looking at like MDF or other things but we did land on a smooth coat of drama yeah don't forget this is production Builder Community the the house that I saw that you guys did at the home store was like one of the finest Custom Homes I've ever seen yep and yet it was 3D printed and this is is a little bit of the opposite in some respects I mean this is meant to be an affordable yeah uh every man house yeah but yet the durability the strength I mean I feel like it's through the roof on this house yeah yeah it will be standing here for you know we hope over 100 years many hundreds of years potentially yeah wins or tornadoes or all that stuff yeah that's that's the Hope yeah that's pretty awesome interesting to see the windows on this house being installed with a sill and then going up so there's really no header on well I guess that's not true you have an LVL header so to speak right because that LVL is burying the weight of for instance in this bathroom of those trusses yeah and really the the LVL is not there to Bear the weight of the trusses it's actually because um we have overhangs on the roof and front and back and so it's actually helping to stabilize the Roof System um the I do like the overhangs by the way what are they on this house three or four feet maybe seven feet on the front two feet on the sides seven foot that's a big overhang yeah that's nice so it's going to keep the walls dry to begin with it will yeah good solar protection right yeah but yeah we take the windows up to the roof line this is kind of that positive interplay between technology and traditional building right because we we don't want to print over openings as much as possible it kind of slows us down but what that brings is a great design aesthetic right more sunlight you get better views um yep I like that in all hundred homes same floor plan in here or what what's the what's the scoop eight different floor plans three variations each okay each are flipped so that's you do the math 48 different variations so this is not just press print and it's the same output every time right now to the printer it doesn't matter it doesn't matter right it's the same thing and so this is the magic of 3D printing right it's you get a lot of variation for no really extra effort but it's not besides the design on the front end yeah but once it's inputed into the printer it can roll that's pretty wild and you guys call this lava Creek this is your proprietary Secret Sauce that you're printing out I love that you even use it for the island on this house is that what's going on here there's a countertop going in yeah getting into Millwork yeah yeah we're not just doing walls we have a planter out front we have kitchen islands and so um really always looking at what we can replace in the home right that's pretty cool what's going on the rest the openings in the in the kitchen here you've got this recess with a couple of Smurf tubes yeah and then maybe a recess behind the uh what's going on there yeah that'll be the fridge yeah we have a couple of open openings in the wall we we call these our MEP openings okay right so this is how we're dropping in uh things like gas and plumbing and connecting them to the appliances or vanities or whatever it is it's in the rest of the home got it yeah so the electrician or the low volt guy will just run a wire in there to the island that's right uh or run a gas a lot flexible gas line whatever well a big initiative this project was getting all MEP in the walls right so in the past we've played with uh electrical but we've also often done wet walls and bathrooms and things like that right we didn't want to do that anymore and so to achieve that you need to give plumbers and electricians somewhere to connect their lines and so that's what this is and it's going to be hidden so you can kind of give them ample room again really all about making the experience good not just for the end user or the customer right but also our trade partners that are building out yeah so we want them to have room we want these things to be pre-located we want this to be easy not not harder right yeah so smart these are I have to tell you though as I'm in the kitchen here I have to thank what is the cabinet guy going to think who comes in here and he's never seen this before and goes you want me to scrub to describe my cabinet filler to that yeah yeah I'll tell them good news you don't describe just put a flat piece in and go again that's right and we know what he's going to think we have uh invited them along the way so they've been a part of the design process a lot of feedback loops there um and so they'll drop it in and because this is a horizontal surface it'll actually be easy to talk to right the vertical surfaces are a little tough a little harder but not on the horizontal no not until they stop that's right put in the countertop caulk around oh they got a big deal yeah and there's no backsplash tile needed in this case right that is your bag natural black backsplash however they're gonna have to use some tapcon screws or whatever whatever the no no-name brand concrete that's right that's right yeah yeah we will be using some uh concrete anchor screws um a couple approaches there you can use the screw straight into the concrete or you can you can use the anchor approach yeah um yeah and think from a cabinet perspective from the camera your perspective you're used to kind of wider tolerances they have to come in and feel measure field measure often in our application the Precision is really tight right so there's a lot more Fidelity around knowing what you need to build so this can allow them to get way ahead in their supply chain yeah that makes a lot of sense real positive so trust roof with some overhangs I'd be worried about uplift how do we make sure this roof doesn't blow off you know if this roof was just sitting on there and the wind blows it's got a lot to pull it off there's got to be some kind of hold Downs or something there what you guys do yeah I'll even take you from the slab okay so um once we start printing we anchor in uh dowels number five rebar dowels into our slab 5 8 rebar that's beefy it's beefy it's big we print all the way up and as we print we print these what we call cores in our wall so these vertical columns okay I saw that it's like a u-shape it's a u-shape right and the beauty of that is just like we only use whatever material that we need we also design no more or no less than we need so those are Precision plates in the wall right around doors and windows and spaced perfectly we print all the way we drop the rest of the number five and thread that in with a coupler take all thread out of the top of the wall slap on the top top plate tighten that down roll the trusses and then attach the sensitize so there's 5 8 steel that's running Foundation all the way up top so I mean that tells me that you guys could probably just beef those up if you were in an earthquake zone and you could print these in California or or somewhere in the west coast too and we have we've printed in earthquake zones in Central America we've printed on the coast where there are high winds we've printed in West Texas right we've printed all over and so awesome our Structural Engineering Consultants like do design to that so yeah it's not theoretical we know you've done it yeah that's pretty cool yeah I see uh I see a stone sill like I've seen in the past from you guys are you guys putting these into to cover everything up and make complete that kind of concrete house look yeah it's our it's our our finished still product that's actually also made with lava creeds is it really we built so it's really gonna match yeah that's right it's it's right it's a it's a versatile material yeah it's pretty awesome made some custom forms that we fill and this house lives a lot larger than I would have expected for a uh uh for a Lennar project yeah our printers can print over 10 feet tall so where are we walking into now yeah this is the primary Suite okay so here's your primary bedroom primary closet I would just noticed this is polished concrete too it is polished okay so we're just power wash off the dirt from construction and you got a finished floor that's right we we pre-polished right we wanted that that polish to run under the wall you can imagine if you wait till after you print right you're gonna get these like weird finishes yeah this looks great yeah and then bathroom over here probably master bath that's right primary back in the corner yep check it out okay so this time now we're not going to express the uh like I've seen in your house zero house you guys just had concrete walls and in the shower air this recess is probably for your plumbing pipes yep so you can see the way it's fully insulated behind right yeah that's right and and we uh you can see one of these MEP openings this one's just really tall okay right so it allows you to drop your plumbing not only for your shower head but for your valves put your backer on tile it and you're done that's it and we're excited about this detail it's actually going to turn a 90 um and we're going to score it into our beads so there's a nice interplay there oh that's pretty smart so just take a concrete saw or a diamond blade yeah score it in and then your tiles slip right in yeah yeah yeah yeah that'll look nice I like that I'm excited about that yeah and uh just a good Builder detail good job Lennar putting a recess in for the shower that's it so if the pan ever leaks there's nothing to go wrong it wouldn't matter if the pan ever leaks that's right I like that and then you get a recess for the tub we do we've got a little toilet room here and we've got a little spot for a mirror and a vanity in here in the corner Yep this is really cool man yeah all ceilings too what are these 10 foot this is nice for for mid-scale kind of residential right it's a good height we're excited about it this is really nice and that's the reaction right often is like man this feels so much bigger than the square footage shows yeah you know the other thing that really strikes me as we've been walking this this house would be super easy to upgrade you know 20 30 years from now you want to come in here and remodel you could really remodel that kitchen in one day there's no drywall to demo the cabinets are wall-to-wall you need to pull the electrical out because there's some new standard or some new wire in 30 years from now no big deal right these windows if you don't like these windows someday you want to upgrade a triple glaze or some custom window boom pop those out and put a new one in you just have a little trim to take care of there's no stucco repair there's no brick to chip out this house is super easy to upgrade and if you had a flood you know minus maybe some wood cabinets there's nothing to do I doubt there's any base molding going in right no base and if these doors were wood doors with wood trim hopefully they will be Lennar you know even if the flood waters came up to here once they recessed if this is solid wood in here no big deal yep it'll be just fine and check this out you've got com concrete screws and every once in a while I see a shim in here and boom there's your opening yeah that's super easy slap it in it install the interior door good to go yep that's really cool yeah Connor what a cool house man I I'd love to show you the other side of the top plate let's go do it yeah it's right here um so we we talked about how we're installing the top plate so you can see that uh this guy is uh CNC cut labeled with the floor plan holy cow check that out so that's concrete contact rated um this looks like one of my favorite materials I know you guys don't like to talk Brands but yeah this looks like one of my show sponsors materials right here yeah you probably know it comment below if you know what this is it is OSB subfloor uh that's awesome rated for contact with concrete and so we're we're flipping the script a bit and put it on the top of the wall that's pretty awesome yeah so that'll finish out and did I see that there are some curves on there too in places yeah so like the wall where that wall ends you've got a curved top on there that's right that's pretty legit the beauty of of CNC machines right so talked about insulation then these walls uh are Hollow right because you actually have a three-ply wall so then what happens in the hollow core yep in the the hollow section of the wall there is open cell moisture resistant foam so it's it's a type of product they often use in like CMU block if needed right um it's the kind that you pour in and there's expands shaving cream it like looks and smells like shaving cream yeah yeah and then how about the roof line yeah I'm assuming it'll be uh some type of open cell phones cellulose in the roof that's lennars um I don't want to speak too much of that yeah yeah but I would go ahead and close sell or open cell phone that and then you could have all your duct work in the condition space as well yeah close that would be my preference but not everybody can afford that and you can get away with with open cell in this uh climate zone yeah and then back door too same deal you've got just a steel lentil of there and then you drop it in the wood Yep this is so cool yeah it's uh this will be a big sliding glass door um and so we you know you have your your drop for your uh for your door to sit on and and we've polied around uh the the wood bucks yep could I uh could I see one of the printers going would that be something you'd allow me to uh to film and leave you guys nicely please pretty please absolutely let's go see it guys foreign [Music] ER what did they have to do to get this slobber is this slab ready for you guys here slab's ready to go yeah and it's in here it's normal construction tolerances and Lennar have been great Partners in delivering slabs within those tolerances so meaning it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect for you guys no no it can absolutely accept uh some tolerance variation there gotcha and they've done that very politically correct for the builders in the audience they know that it's not perfect but it's but it needs to be good with intolerance right within a tolerant spec um the the new the new detail on this lab is is a slope right um so this is just like kind of a standard uh brick lug that you a builder may be used to it's the same concept slightly different execution we shift our homes around as a block as a unit right and so to give us the ability to do that we've we've built a slope so that we can shift if you have just a ledge and you need to shift One Direction you're going to fall off and that's going to cause that inside wall could be anywhere along here and it wouldn't really matter that's right that's right but the outside wall the point is if water were to migrate through there somehow it's going to hit this and it's got a you know quarter inch to a foot or so that's right or somewhere in there to slide on out yeah that's really smart it's your belt and suspenders and I love wearing abilities yarn and all that yeah you know it gets down to the bottom gets it out we also have a Polish on it you can see that looks great so they polish it obviously it makes sense to do it when there's nothing in the way whereas in the walls are up it'd be a real pain to come and polish it so the polisher in fact I saw a guy over here when we were coming in polishing just has one big wide open slab knocks it out probably in a couple hours yeah leaning into some efficiencies there right it has some not going to benefits too like the slab is going to be the finished floor so it gets under the wall also it it protects during construction and then when you're done you do a quick touch-up polish and you're good to go yeah it makes sense let's go see one of the burners let's do it foreign [Music] ER there this is a huge privilege for me to be on the site while you guys are printing uh talk me through the details like the rail system I'm seeing here I'm assuming this has to be pretty close to dead level right yeah it does and this is our kind of current iteration of uh the rails that our printer uh works on so this floats outside of the slab so we want to kind of free the slab up from the knee to support the system okay that makes sense yeah and so because of that we go through some kind of stabilization efforts and then we align them with the laser to make sure that they are dead leveled dead straight Dead real well yep and then the printer just rides in the rail system and then I've seen different versions of this this is a a three uh beat three beat thank you I think I've seen two in the past will you talk me through what's happening here yeah we're constantly playing with that right we we kind of we can kind of design horses for horses right we can we can customize depending on situation that we're in so our standard typical wall system on an exterior wall is a three B wall system okay so you have a structural interior wall that's a double white so that's this guy the double watt two wise two courses just like in masonry right just like in masonry and then our veneer bead that's a single wife on the outside of the home okay um we reinforce that with number two rebar that lays along the bead um uh on the interior and exterior so those are all custom bent to match the shape of our wall um what's this and happening here and here because I'm seeing the curve in the yeah in the wall so this is our typical core so we call this the core it's a vertical column okay this is what we'll print uh install the number five dowel we'll print all the way up drop the number five down so if I looked in that hole there'd be a number five it's it's epoxied into the slab there better be sticking up and it's threaded so then when it's all done I saw in that other one across the way there there's a number five rebar that's threaded sticking up that's right and that's that's going to basically tie down the roof so it's plenty windy today yeah when that wind comes from the Georgetown uh uh West Wind it's going to not blow that roof off because it's tied all the way back down that's right that's right we're sandwiching the walls with the and then do you solid grout these later or is that happening during the process later so we make it all the way to the top we drop our reinforcement in and then actually Vulcan fills the cores as well so we use lava Creek to fill um The Grotto vulcan's the name of your printer side sorry all right yeah and how many printers do you have going on this site we have seven out here holy cow that's awesome yep that's just the start we're getting more and then we'll have future projects and are you guys printing like on 24-hour shifts or what's happening I wish we're still we're still uh navigating relationships with municipalities and yeah we have neighbors and we want to be respectful so um just during the day hours but we're maximizing our day hours printing seven days a week out here but I bet it would be better for you guys I suspect in for productivity to actually run all the time because once this machine gets going you probably wanted to maximize its efficiency yeah it's not like the robot's getting tired it's not getting tired the human do but we can rotate the humans out right so think of it like a plane right lift off and Landing is the hardest part right once you're flying you want to you want to kind of stay flying we want to we want to keep our printers flying yeah your fuel efficiency is best actually when you're flying not what you're taking off that's right or when you're on the highway in your car right so we want to we want to get rolling and then we want to keep rolling right we perform soft cleans as we go but uh that's the ideal State and there are places we can do that yeah just not here the other thing that's funny about construction is you know on most job sites if we were building walls there'd be nail guns and radios and saws you're I don't hear a sound from that printer which is what 10 feet behind me yeah I mean I would suspect that besides some lights that actually this process would be really quiet and if you could get a municipality to go oh okay no big deal at midnight they have a couple of uh job lights and other than that there's not much noise yeah it really it's less about the mechanics I've I've actually uh I wrote a decibel report for this job site myself uh took readings at different uh distances away from the slab and we get to ambient noise levels pretty quick yeah so so not loud at all the line is minus the win today sorry guys yeah yeah you can hear us okay yeah so so so very the technology is ready to work 24 7. yeah which need to convince folks to let us do it talk to me about timelines this house uh looks like I can probably tell that the first couple layers here have been printed it's noon time or so today yeah how long does it take to print one of these houses and these aren't small houses by the way yeah averaging about 2 000 square feet um before I answer the time question it's really important to me for me to address what we're replacing right because you have to kind of run that Apples to Apples comparison sure so we're replacing the framing of course but also the exterior sheathing yeah the exterior veneer uh the interior drywall there's no stucco crew here no stucco drywall that's right so it's all that so now that I've oriented your mind that's a big deal we started around three to four week timeline on those our first few we're trending down toward a two to three week time frame something at all for that for that wall system delivery so you not only save on the time right but the coordination for the GC right they're not having a call that's pretty awesome now and if you could go 24 hours a day I suspect that a house that's two thousand square feet like this could get printed in a couple of days really yeah that's the hope if you're going from Foundation to trade Partners in the house too that's it that's it right it's crazy it's framer the trades people could all start right after that yeah yeah that's that's the hope uh we you don't just gain kind of like double the time you actually gain a lot more time because again you're not taking off and Landing you're leaning into the efficiencies and so let's let's Embrace technology and and let it do its job right so that's the long-term goal so I got a random question okay I suspect you get this question all the time how do you hang a picture on these wolves oh man I've never gotten that question shockingly no I uh here's what I like to say Matt you have a stud everywhere it's great it's 100 sheet it's like a plywood house that's it man yeah so you can hang it wherever you want wherever you want there's not a single crappy drywall anchor anywhere that's gonna pull out on this no no hang your TV wherever you want it's beautiful yeah so uh yeah it's very easy use a concrete screw if you want to move the picture rail is what I would say hey guys you guys did a super slick picture rail on your uh yeah your house I toured that was the one house yeah house zero yeah pretty awesome yeah picture rail hang it yep so then while this thing's going um it looks to me like you just have one or two people here on site to tend to the uh robot is that right yeah that's it right now all right we have uh a crew size of four people okay um so one running Vulcan one running magma which is our material delivery system it's what mixes the lava cream okay a QC Tech that's ensuring everything is per spec yeah and then a site lead that's running the site uh by the end of this year we'll be down to two or three and then eventually we want to get down to one per site and then less than one per side is amazing yep what about uh what about cracking like in the last house we were at I saw maybe one floor crack and that was it and that was a post these are post-tension slabs uh by lenar which is well regarded by production Builders as a good slab to be more crack resistant not Crack free all right but less cracks typically but you don't have post tension here and I I haven't seen any cracks really in any of your projects is that and you Pro maybe I'm I'm getting into too much proprietary here but there's probably some super plasticizers used in the concrete mix which help with that and maybe there's even some fiberglass uh rebar not fiberglass rebar fiberglass what am I trying to say embedment I know you you can't see anything there's something going on here because these houses don't have any cracks including the one that Connor and I were just at and I've seen houses now that are two or two or three or four years old at the community first village where I built some wood frame houses and y'all built some concrete houses you all have some Secret Sauce going on here you've perfected it I I I'm not at Liberty talking about the the yeah but what I will say is is the as you know you have a lot of smart Engineers here well we have many people that are much smarter than I am that are that are scientists and have their doctorates and uh are designing this stuff but also concrete like the the way that crack cracking cracking happens is is how it cures right sure so there's a lot of focus on that both with our mixture how we treat it after we print it the kind of environments that we're printing in and so we pay a lot of attention to that right like how we mix it the time of day how that mix responds to the time of day right and so we want to mix it so that when we lay that bead down it cures appropriately and so it's strong and it's resistant to cracking that's the that's the hope and now the way we do that I mean your QC is incredible it's pretty wild appreciate that we've worked hard anything I missed on this particular Foundation it's interesting to see this is a whole different floor plan the last house we were just at isn't it yeah one of eight this is one of eight floor plans a completely different one yeah totally different um yeah so we have we have you know three different elevations per and they all flip so you get up to 48 pretty quick but um yeah no you can you can see our our reinforcements kind of staged and ready to go our site lead is misting the walls to make sure they kind of cure slowly over time that's pretty cool um I suspect that people will be touring this neighborhood in 50 years and saying this is one of the first full neighborhoods of concrete 3D printed houses that icon did that's right and now they're in every state of the union and or a hundred countries around the world building a hundred thousand houses a day who knows what will happen someday they're naming my dream match I really really appreciated I know that you guys have somewhere on site a very iconic personality the founder uh the guy that always wears the cowboy hat Jason is somewhere over here so I'm gonna go see if I can find Jason I bet you'll find him around appreciate your help man thanks for the tour absolutely [Music] foreign guys Jason the CEO Jason last time I saw you was at the house zero which was super sick but here you don't just have a house you have a hundred houses that's the idea this is this is this is where we like really grow up and you know um it's fun to do the sort of show houses and the show pieces but really the company was started to solve the global housing crisis and so we want to be able to do fantastic things but we need to be able to do fantastic things at scale and this is where we're learning to do them at scale dang Jason this is crazy I mean from here you might could jump to ten thousand houses or fifty thousand houses you know the funny thing is I think it actually is harder probably to go from one to a hundred yeah because if we can do 100 it's not hard to imagine 200 and if you can do 100 you can do 500 and I think that's exactly right and that's sort of the the sort of inherent scalability of software robots and the things that we work with I think that's exactly right it's harder to make the first one work than to make the 75th one work okay so since I've seen you Jason you've gotten contracts with NASA you've got contracts for the Army I'm sure you can't even tell me all the details of those but I suspect if the Army's talking to you and NASA wants to be able to print houses someday maybe even on another planet we're you're probably interested in reducing the amount of Labor that it takes uh you know you've got quite a few icon people on site is there some thought to I'm sure there has been how many people it would take to operate a printer either today or in the future yeah that's a great question so like even though we have like a lot of innovation at Icon and a lot of like really fun fancy things going on at the end of the day like building is still like materials in labor and so we've tried to like simplify our material supply chain and then and make the material that we work with as affordable as possible and then it's about reducing and removing and optimizing labor from that point so right now on a standard day here out on this project we're running like 4 five people per print reg I think by the end of the year we'll be on the order of two to three and then in the next couple years our goal is to be sub one human per printer and so like one human overseeing like multiple robots that are doing most of the building so that's the idea and so like if you can simplify your material supply chain drive down the cost of that material and then come very close to removing labor altogether I think all of a sudden you get like very fantastic architecture for fractions of the price and so yeah yeah that's exactly the plan but not only that the resilience I mean I I've traveled around the world and seen how other people build it and we're very wood oriented in North America we're blessed with amazing Timber resources but lots of parts of the world like when I was in Haiti in the benic in public they've got these local block making facilities and all their houses are concrete I could be any in anywhere in the world right now in this masonry building yeah I actually you know and I love wood I don't I don't want to sort of knock on wood or whatever in fact how zero that you're in like sort of prominently featured wood I'm not I'm not touching big fan of drywall uh not allowed but um on the sort of resiliency Factor you're exactly right is that these homes are they exceed a building code in terms of like structural Integrity by 350 percent we exceed energy code by about 250 and that's sort of like standard right like you don't have to like pay up to get those things special going so I think that kind of building should become default it should become standard and we should be building this way as commonplace and perhaps wood Uh Wood is a primary building material should become sort of like more specialized uh and and site-specific building material and you're using in this case where it makes sense right this trust roof which trusses by the way are a great use of wood because we've engineered it we've thought about it even LVL beams and advantec top plates uh you've used wood the way it should be used which is a precious resource use it wisely correct that's exactly right that's pretty wild yeah but the structure of the home right like you sort of want it to be like inherently uh non-palatable to termites you want it to inherently not grow mold you want it to inherently be like windproof waterproof these sorts of things but with wood as lovely as it is I think that's the and it has good tensile strength but it like naturally wants to catch fire it's actually a conductor of heat so you're having to work against the natural properties of the material when you use it as like an infrastructure material and so yeah we think it should be used more as an accent or when it like uh like a ceiling and a roof is a great where there's like a lot of tensile loads right and all of a sudden it really like comes into uh it comes into its strings you know the other thing that I thought about too as you were saying that was you know this would be a pretty flood proof home if we had flood waters up to here when those flood waters receded there'd really be nothing to do here over there what we say is like yeah you probably replace the floor in the furniture but like the bones of the home in terms of how how soon can your family move back in and get back to work very quick I mean I grew up on the Gulf Coast I think you know that my hometown has been destroyed by hurricanes like half a dozen times in my lifetime including uh the home I grew up in like my family just finally had to abandon because it was just like it had gotten like seven feet of water in the house and so like I have like sort of live through like my family spending the holidays and FEMA trailers and yeah yeah and like every day and then we'd put it back together with drywall right and like you know those moisture sensitive product ever invented my joke that you've heard me make is like if I offered a million dollar prize to invent a less resilient material that would pass building codes nobody would ever climb nobody would ever claim the prize because drywall already won the prize for like the worst thing we can build with I mean and speaking of the worst we're in a neighborhood that's north of town and there's neighborhoods around here being built by other builders that literally have cardboard sheathing on two by fours yeah and then you compare that with this neighborhood being built by Lennar which is a very large Builder I mean this is about as resilient of a house as you can potentially buy anywhere in America today no that's right and they're going to have standing seam metal roofs they're going to all have solar power 350 stronger than necessary 250 more energy efficient than necessary and they'll be in the same price point that's crazy prices like the sort of the the proof point is like not only can we do this at scale but like the kind of house you get at any price point that we're working at is just like much more um the word we like to use is like dignity it's like housing with dignity so I mean I used to work for one of the big National Builders I'm shocked if all 100 top builders in America haven't called you Jason to try and get you uh you know on one of their subjects we're definitely trying to make Believers out of people right I mean um Builders do things the way they do for good reason not because they're Wicked people because it has worked it continues to work and there's demand for it and so you have to like uh we have to create these like uh embodied Arguments for why we can and should do things a different way and so I think I hope one day this neighborhood is very famous that like maybe they'll do school trips here one day go hey kids this is the very this was the first neighborhood ever built by robots right and so um and and I hope more people will become Believers as they say as they see design proof points like how zero as they see sort of scaled housing product proof points like with this Wolf Ranch project with Lennar I I think this is sort of just still the beginning of the Revolution I love it Jason last question for you this is a hard one talk to me about your thoughts after seeing this all these years on the wabi-sabi the imperfectness because if you look at it with squinty eyes it looks absolutely perfect but yet if you were to go in any particular spot you might see some slight imperfections somewhere uh you know you've had the house zero open in the public now uh for the home store and a bunch of other reasons what feedback do you have and you in the other community I visited you had I don't know a dozen houses maybe now that you've got a hundred what do you think the Public's going to say about this no drywall no like oh this little piece here needs a little touch of drywall touch yeah we've had a few thousand people uh through house zero which is the the house that we had that more people have seen up and closing in person than any other uh the print quality on that house is even lower accuracy than on this house yeah um so that bothered me a lot but the the universal um feedback we've got from the folks like the house is incredible um same here like um the Lennar board of directors the Lennar exec team the little armor there everybody's been here everybody loves it and so it turns out I think I like I'm our biggest critic what I say is like that's great if people love it then I should do it on purpose yeah my goal is ultimately that the printer doesn't do anything that we didn't plan for it to do in the meantime I think it's uh it's our good luck that people like the sort of the live material feel of it so live material there you go yeah yeah it's it almost feels like an natural or a man-made material even if it's printed that's right the the word the words that people have used who have we've had a lot of people stay in house zero um are like uh cozy in the way like a cave might have been cozy to our ancestors right and it's not so much like a fortress it feels alive it feels warm and uh we're pleased with that because it's it it matters not just that it's faster and more affordable it matters that these are the best houses you can possibly buy and live in and part of that is the experience of living in them and so we take that super seriously that's unbelievable yeah hey I'm sorry I didn't think of one other question okay hey tell me uh about price points in this neighborhood like these houses aren't quite for sale yet by the way they will be I'm hoping that Lennar gets a ridiculous amount of like Taylor Swift style inquiries yeah when these houses go on the market that they can't even believe the demand so that they go to you guys and say hey let's do 10 000 of these next year but yep uh can you give me any idea where he's going to land prices so it's sort of lennar's news to deliver but what I'll say is they'll be priced exactly like other lennars okay I'm surprised in Georgetown that are new go for about a half a million dollars ish I don't know where they're gonna go there'll be some cheaper my guess is they're going to be somewhere in that range you got it pretty darn affordable it's it's underneath the conforming loan that's right they are going to be below like sort of uh mortgage and certainly more affordable than you would usually for a house's standing scene metal roof world class architecture solar panels I mean so they can take a five foot flood yeah probably I don't know for sure probably a category five uh uh you know tornado could hit over here I bet these houses would look pretty damn good yeah that's exactly I don't think their house is this good this affordably anywhere else on the planet in the whole world for this price correct Jason so good to see you man keep killing it dared thanks man look forward to seeing you again [Music] I literally feel like I got a peek into the future like I took a time travel machine and got to see how houses of the future were being built this is a groundbreaking subdivision here outside of Austin if you're interested in these houses I think they're going to be for sale pretty soon I'll put a link to iconbuild.com which is icon's website you can learn more at that website uh go follow these guys on Instagram too super cool company everyone I've met with them just top-notch people and to see this thing printing these houses here my hope is that we're going to see this all across the U.S in fact all across the world because this is an incredible way to build with serious durability with built-in fire resistance with uh you know built-in flood resistance and natural disaster resiliency resistance I mean this is a really really cool groundbreaking Community I suspect my grandchildren are going to drive by this in 50 years and go yeah Granddad got to film out there with these guys when this was under construction we actually got to see them printing them and now they're printing them all over the world and maybe even on some other worlds as well guys if you're not currently a subscriber hit that subscribe button below you know we've got new content every Tuesday and every Friday I better get out of here follow me on Twitter Tick Tock otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show [Music]

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 700,023

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: Y-4S7cdo3tY

Length: 41min 53sec (2513 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023