The convergence of new technologies including artificial intelligence, the internet of things, electric cars, and drone delivery systems suggests an unlikely solution to the growing housing crisis. In the next few years, we may use an app on our smartphones to notify our houses to pick us up or drop us off. Honda recently announced the IeMobi

At this year’s South by Southwest Festival (SXSW), Austin-based startup ICON unveiled the first residential permitted 3-D-printed house in the United States. ICON is partnered with the non-profit New Story, which has constructed homes for thousands of displaced residents across Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia. The young firm views their technology as an practical tool to address the sheltering needs of the

While refugee camps are generally designed to be temporary, they often end up staying up for many years and become full, functioning cities in their own right, housing generations of people—Dheisheh camp, in Palestine, for example has been continuously occupied since 1949. However, because the materials they are built with—often just tents or tarps over

Autodesk is making a bet on the future of prefabrication for disaster housing with an investment in FactoryOS and the company’s California-based “Rapid Response Factory.” In addition to allowing the startup to begin experimenting with constructing post-natural disaster homes on the factory floor, the funding will reportedly allow the Bay Area startup to create a

Not content with monopolizing the home sharing market, Airbnb will soon start designing and selling their own affordable houses. Yesterday, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia announced that the tech company would begin recruiting architects, engineers, industrial designers, roboticists, and more to join their housing prototype initiative Backyard. More than just a design exercise, Airbnb is looking to create sustainable,

Hot off of a flamethrower fundraising sale for Elon Musk’s side project, the Hyperloop tunnel digging The Boring Company, Musk has announced that the muck, rock, and detritus produced by the company’s tunneling would be turned into usable bricks. The first announcement from Musk came on March 26, when he tweeted that the rock mined from the company’s California test tunnels would be

Aurimas Sabulis is CEO of Dextall and a pioneer behind the revolutionary software solution that shortens the existing design process of mid and high-rise building exteriors by more than twenty times. In addition to improving design process inefficiencies, the software also drives sustainability and net-zero energy goals throughout the design process. Under his leadership, Dextall

Joseph Freund is an AEC Application Specialist at Microsol Resources, an Autodesk Platinum Partner, in their New York office. He has experience designing single-family homes, healthcare facilities, and affordable housing. He is interested in the relationship between technology and the designer, particularly how generative design can develop spatial solutions intelligently driven by data while elegantly

In Arizona, the state with the fourth most dire affordable housing shortage according to National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC)’s recently released Gap report, the Central Arizona chapter of global nonprofit Habitat for Humanity is looking to pave the way for new modes of sustainable, scalable low-cost housing across the Grand Canyon State. How? With the aid of ample local largesse and a

Additive construction company Alquist and the Virginia Center for Housing Research (VCHR) at Virginia Tech have partnered to design, build, and study a 3D-printed single-family home that’s the first of its kind in the United States: funded by a private-public partnership grant. Work on the three-bedroom, 1,550-square-foot home broke ground earlier this week at 217 Carnation Street in Richmond’s Midlothian neighborhood.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has announced that it will colead the design of a community gathering place/small business incubator/“eco-food hub” in Englewood, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. TnS Studio, a self-described “Black-owned, Woman-powered” Chicago architecture firm headed by Taylor Staten and Courtney Harris, will spearhead the design of the space—dubbed Englewood Connect—alongside SOM as part

Just an hour east of the first mass-produced suburb in the United States, a new model of affordable, quick-to-build housing has been realized—and is now for sale—in the town of Riverhead on Long Island’s North Shore. Boasting three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and a spacious open floor plan, the suburban New York home in question

The Provincial Centre for Sustainability and Innovation in Construction (better known as Kamp C) in the Belgian municipality of Westerlo has completed work on a two-story model home, measuring just shy of 970 square feet, that was produced as a single piece by a fixed 3D printer—a world’s first. The concrete printer in question is

Dubai is now home to what is claimed to be the world’s largest on-site 3D-printed building. The 31-foot-tall, two-story government agency was printed in on-site three weeks using a single printer developed by the Boston-based Apis Cor, which has previously garnered attention for their sub-$10,000 printed home and for winning NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge along

Level 3, number 203. Turn right 10 feet. Go straight for 15 feet. The best way to experience data’s strong grip on everyday life in China is to open up Baidu Maps, a mapping app by China’s biggest search engine company, and walk around a shopping mall for one afternoon. Inside the building, a network

In most major cities of the world, an urban tech landscape has emerged. One day, we were working on our laptops at Starbucks, and the next, we were renting desks at WeWork. We embedded our small architectural and design firms in low-rent spaces in old factories and warehouses, and then we emerged as “TAMI” (technology,

“What if you could download and print a house for half the cost?” reads the lede for the Vulcan II, a 3D printer with a name suited for sci-fi space exploration, on the website of Austin-based company ICON. Now the company has put this claim to the test, building what it says is the first

Just weeks after it announced a partnership with the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech to design, build, and study America’s first 3D-printed, private-public partnership grant-funded single-family home in Richmond, Alquist has revealed another unprecedented project underway in Williamsburg, Virginia. This time, it’s the East Coast’s first 3D-printed Habitat for Humanity dwelling. The project, spearheaded by additive construction company Alquist with Habitat for

Bologna- and Milan-based Mario Cucinella Architects (MC A) and leading Italian 3D printing company WASP have revealed a newly-completed TECLA, a high-performance prototype dome house that marries primordial materials and advanced construction technology. Built from locally sourced clay using Crane WASP, a newly developed modular 3D-printing system, the deeply sustainable two-room dwelling is the first 3D-printed structure to be realized using indigenous

Just a year after Austin, Texas–based construction technology startup ICON first unveiled a half-dozen 3D-printed homes at a 51-acre community established to provide affordable, permanent housing for formerly homeless residents of the city, the fast-growing (and Bjarke Ingels Group–backed) company has announced, in partnership with Kansas City, Missouri–based real estate developer 3Strands, the arrival of a new development in East Austin populated by two-to-four-bedroom homes that

Much has been made about the physical separation necessitated by the novel coronavirus. But the pandemic has also laid bare the digital divide separating communities across the country. Over the past few months, millions of Americans have had to shift their daily activities online with the help of web-based applications, productivity tools, and videoconferencing platforms.

This May 3 to May 6, the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse is hosting the inaugural Smart Cities NYC conference and expo. Smart Cities NYC is ambitious in its scope, with a global selection of speakers whose backgrounds include government, the tech industry, academia, real estate/development, and design. Autonomous vehicles, public health, construction technology, resilient urban landscapes,