Read the full article on our portfolio company, ICON, by the New York Times here.
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By Debra Kamin Visuals by Jordan Vonderhaar
Debra Kamin reported from Austin, Texas, where she visited 3-D printed communities and spent the night in a 3-D printed house.
Growing up in a small town in East Texas, Jason Ballard didn’t imagine he would one day use robots to print houses. He was busy chasing flying squirrels and swimming with alligators in the dense conifer woods behind Texas’s pine curtain.
He felt called to God in those woods, which always smelled like Christmas. He thought he would be a preacher, and after high school, he entered the formal discernment process, a testing-of-the-waters of priesthood.
In addition to the heavens, he was drawn to big, romantic ideas about space above and the earth below. So he reached for both. First, he earned a bachelor’s degree in conservation biology, and fascinated with sustainable building, he took on an apprenticeship in carpentry (the biblical parallels were not lost on him). He also earned a master’s degree in space resources to perhaps pursue becoming an astronaut.
But what Mr. Ballard carried with him from his childhood, between happy recollections of horseback rides and airborne rodents, was the memory of spending a Christmas in a Federal Emergency Management Agency trailer. Hurricane Andrew, which killed 65 people, had forced his family to evacuate from Orange, Texas. He would later evacuate from Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike, as well.
His mission, he decided, would be to stay exactly where he had started, in Texas, and develop housing. The homes would be sturdy, maybe even miraculous, and cheaper to construct yet better suited to withstand hurricanes and fires. In 2017, Mr. Ballard co-founded ICON, a construction technology company that is focused on using 3-D printers to help solve the housing crisis that has crushed the dream of homeownership for the majority of young Americans.
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