3D printing a housing revolution with Jason Ballard of ICON

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. So a lot of places in the US and in cities around the world are dealing with housing shortages. And these shortages are leading to all kinds of social and economic problems, things like really high home prices and Even homelessness. Part of the problem is zoning, but the other part is the cost to build a house, especially with inflation.

But imagine you could cut those costs by two thirds or even more. and you could still build a great, high-quality, energy efficient home. Well, this is what Jason Ballard set out to do. A few years ago, he started a company called Icon, and the idea was to use 3D printing technology to build houses. Fast forward to today and the company has built dozens of these houses in Texas and in Mexico, with hundreds more in the planning stages. Now before he launched Icon, Jason ran an eco-friendly building supply store called Treehouse with his college classmate Evan Loomis.

But while Treehouse grew pretty quickly and has been largely successful, it wasn't long before Jason started to think about ways to make an even bigger impact. At the time it was more like, could tree house be doing more? What like'cause that was no I was the CO and founder of that company and so that was that's Where my focus was. And so I kind of made a list of things that I wanted to be true about the way that we build. I want it to be sustainable. I want it to be affordable. I want it to be. deployable at scale and with some speed. I want it to be beautiful. Uh sort of respecting human dignity.

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