By Todd Woody Giant robots made by Austin startup Icon began 3D-printing an entire neighborhood of suburban homes in late 2022; this week, the company introduced an AI architect to design them. It’s a technological leap that Icon says could one day spell the demise of cookie-cutter suburbia and usher in an era of low-cost, low-carbon and climate-resilient housing. “There’s no reason to build ugly-ass spec homes anymore,” Icon founder and chief executive officer Jason Ballard tells me at the company’s headquarters near downtown Austin (while wearing his customary white cowboy hat). “We don’t just need to make housing more affordable; it actually also needs to get better.” Icon has spent 18 months developing its artificial intelligence program — named Vitruvius after an ancient Roman architect — which uses a chatbot to converse with would-be homeowners about their dream projects. After the user responds to a series of prompts, Vitruvius offers several versions of a house, complete with exterior and interior renderings and floor plans. For now, humans are still needed to turn those plans into buildable reality. Vitruvius is at least a year away from being able to draw up full construction documents, permit applications, budgets, bills of materials and a building schedule, Ballard says — an ambitious timeline for an untested technology tackling a complex interplay of tasks. But if those processes can be automated, Icon estimates the software could shave at least $100,000 from the price of a home.  Icon co-founder and CEO Jason Ballard stands next to a structure built by the startup’s 3D-printing robot using its new low-carbon concrete. Photographer: Thomas Allison “Let’s play. What do you want?” Ballard asks me as he launches Vitruvius on a conference room screen and a chat window pops up. I ask the AI to show me a modern 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom home in the California beach town of Bolinas. “Sounds like you’re envisioning a contemporary one-story home with an open feel,” Vitruvius responds. “Before we proceed with the design, can you tell me more about your lifestyle and how you envision using the space in your home?” I respond that two people and a dog would live in the house and that I want a seamless flow between home and nature, plus a work space. “Considering your location in Bolinas and desire to integrate with nature, would you like the design to include specific outdoor features such as a deck patio or garden areas?” it asks. I would. Within seconds, Vitruvius displays a collection of stunning homes and floor plans in a setting that resembles coastal California. The homes include conventional construction as well as a curvy 3D-printed model. (Vitruvius always includes at least one 3D-printed option.)  A rendering of a California house designed for the author by Icon’s new AI architect. Courtesy of Icon Ballard credits the inspiration for Icon’s AI architect to a chance encounter with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a conference two years ago, before the release of ChatGPT triggered an AI gold rush. Ballard told Altman about his idea for architecture software that might eventually add AI. “He said, ‘Your timeline is wrong. You should start building it as an AI system right now,’ and gave me some tips and pointers,” Ballard says. Maria Paz Gutierrez, an associate professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, says 3D printing “in principle can offer unique advantages to address affordable housing prices issues because it can substantially decrease building time and potentially material usage.” So is architect the next human job under existential threat from artificial intelligence? Ballard says Vitruvius will relieve architects of onerous design duties like drafting construction documents. Icon is also offering architects an opportunity to profit from its 3D-printing tech if they submit plans to the company’s new catalog of ready-to-print home designs, CodeX. CodeX is launching with 63 plans for homes, ranging from under $99,000 to well over $1 million. The catalog includes some 40 designs from famed architects Bjarke Ingels Group that take advantage of 3D-printing to create avant-gard wildfire- and storm-resilient homes. (One model, for instance, mounts kitchen cabinets high off the floor to minimize flood damage.)  A rendering of a storm-resilient home designed by Bjarke Ingels Group for Icon’s CodeX catalog. Courtesy of Icon But Icon’s ability to actually execute on Vitruvius and CodeX designs depends on the company’s next-generation robot, called Phoenix. During my visit, a prototype works across the street to build a large Gaudí-esque structure whose walls ripple across the lot like an infinite wave. The robot behind Icon’s 3D-printed neighborhood, Vulcan, consists of a crossbar that moves up and down between two towers that travel along fixed rails straddling a building site. A nozzle attached to the crossbar extrudes a proprietary concrete mixture called Lavacrete, which the robot lays down to form the exterior and interior walls of a one-story building. The nozzle on Phoenix, on the other hand, sits at the end of a 23-foot-long arm attached to a small platform with tank-like treads that can freely rumble around a building site. In Austin, Phoenix’s arm swoops down to the curving 100-foot-long structure, adding layers of Lavacrete to the second story of what will be a 27-foot-tall building when completed.  Phoenix with the completed two-story structure in Austin. Courtesy of Icon Phoenix’s height and maneuverability give it the capacity to build multi-story structures in more free-flowing designs. It can also build roofs and foundations. And while workers had to manually install rebar to reinforce the walls printed by Vulcan, a spool of galvanized steel cable is extruded inside each layer of concrete Phoenix applies. Icon estimates that Phoenix will cut the build time for a 3D-printed home in half, to one week, while reducing the cost of the wall system by 30% compared to conventional construction. The climate cost of Icon’s homes is also falling. While its 3D-printed homes generate little construction waste, concrete’s carbon footprint makes the homes’ emissions substantially higher than wood-frame alternatives. This week, the company unveiled a low-carbon concrete formula called CarbonX that brings the emissions of a 3D-printed home 2% to 6% below those of a same-size wood-frame building over their lifespan, according to an analysis conducted by Icon and MIT. “This 3D printing allows us to improve the productivity of concrete construction, and newly engineered materials and concrete mix design like Icon’s reduces emissions associated with the production of concrete,” says Hessam Azarijafari, deputy director of MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub. A world in which Icon’s home-building robots execute plans shared directly by its AI architects remains a ways off, but Ballard says that’s the likely future. “Humans will be in the loop at multiple points, but directionally I think that’s correct,” he says. “An AI system isn’t limited in its capacity for memory and intelligence and creativity.” | 
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