Huge: Toward 3D-Printed Futures

Huge’s Ian Volner was kind enough to quote me in his report from South by Southwest about the starchitect Bjarke Ingels and his latest project: a 3D-printed luxury resort in Marfa, Texas designed in conjunction with the tech/construction company ICON.

Volner gamely reports on their ambitions to use the resort as a testbed for lowering the costs of housing construction, but he’s skeptical, as am I:

So can 3D printing finally crack the code? Only a few months before the Initiative 99 announcement, BIG and ICON broke ground on a 100-house development in Georgetown, Texas. Comprising single-family dwellings of the old-fashioned, gable-roofed type, the project certainly looks marketable, but with starting prices around the $450,000 mark, it hardly appears to be a silver bullet for America’s affordability crisis. As Greg Lindsay puts it, the near-term architectural impact of computer-guided construction is likely to remain somewhat abstract, producing “shapes and aesthetics” that can “build more excitement than a 3D-printed subdivision.”

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