New Builds

The floors are all concrete, and the kitchen, which includes a mini fridge and microwave, has blue-gray stone countertops. “We had a stone company in Austin offer to help us with the project,” McKinney says. “Our seed neighbor was so excited as we looked at dozens and dozens of big slabs of stone.”

Community First! Village is one of the safest neighborhoods in Austin. “Alan Graham, CEO of Mobile Loaves & Fishes, said that in the beginning, people were apprehensive about the community coming in and didn’t know what it would be like,” McKinney says. “It’s turned out to have one of the lowest incidents of crime because everybody is on the same page and takes care of one another.”

The home’s small footprint can be efficiently heated and cooled, and the windows and cutouts above the barn door provide passive ventilation.

Community First! hopes to expand to other parts of Austin—the organization has purchased several more acres on the east side.

McKinney York partnered with BEC Austin, whom they worked with on phase one, to build the micro homes. With phase two, their goal was to make the design “easy enough so that people who weren’t skilled laborers and were volunteers could take the drawing and build one themselves,” McKinney says. “With phase one, the houses were hard to pull off for anyone that wasn’t a carpenter.”

The first round of homes were printed three at a time to maximize efficiency. Here, a site worker oversees production.

Claire Zinnecker designed the interiors of the 3D-printed homes, and DEN Property Group providing all furnishings for the six future residents.

ICON’s 3D-printing construction process, which makes use of robotics, automated material handling, advanced software, and a proprietary concrete, Lavacrete, offers a new way to quickly build homes that are both resilient and beautiful in a price range significantly below comparable conventional approaches.

ICON's Vulcan II printer spits out a proprietary concrete mix to build the homes' primary structures.