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ICON is a company with a civilizational thesis, trying to solve a civilization-scale problem, rooted in love for the world, and with an insanely optimistic vision of the human future. I co-founded ICON because I could not accept the world we were building. Shelter is one of the oldest and most fundamental human needs, and yet we have somehow made it increasingly difficult and expensive to provide. But affordability was never the entire problem for me. Affordability is necessary, but not sufficient. I want the world we build to feel incredible. I want our homes, neighborhoods, towns, and cities to reflect the inherent dignity and worth of the people who live in them. I want them to be beautiful, resilient, surprising, and vibrant. I want the things we imagine in science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and artists’ studios to be incarnated in the real world. I want to solve the global housing crisis. And I want to build on the Moon.

The problem is that construction never really had its industrial revolution. The farmer got the tractor. Manufacturing got the assembly line. Transportation got the jet engine. Computing transformed nearly everything. Construction mostly kept building the same way: assembling buildings by hand, from thousands of parts, through a fragmented network of trades, suppliers, contractors, building codes, inspectors, and jurisdictions. Regulations multiplied.  Productivity barely moved while labor became scarcer, materials became more expensive, and all at a time when we were demanding more from our buildings.  The system became so entrenched that it became almost impossible to imagine its replacement. But the problems became so systemic that there came a point where improving the old way was no longer enough. We have to make another way.  A new way.

And so we did. For the better part of the last decade, ICON has been building construction-scale robotic 3D printers and materials and software and artificial intelligence and architecture and taking them out of the laboratory and into the dust and heat and rain of the actual world. We have built hundreds of structures. Homes for families who had never known safe shelter. The world’s first neighborhood of 100 3D-printed homes with one of the largest homebuilders in America. Barracks for soldiers. Homes made to stand against hurricanes. Architecture that could scarcely have been built by other means. A full-scale Mars habitat for NASA.  We have built robots that can print virtually any two-story building. We have developed materials that resist fire, wind, water, mold, and decay.  And we have taken the technology from an experiment to an in-the-field system that can build faster, with fewer people, less waste, greater design freedom, and lower cost.

We began by asking whether a robot could print a house. That question is behind us now. The question before us is what happens when building itself becomes robotic and intelligent. Because ICON is not simply a 3D printing company. We are building a new way to build, and even now we are still only laying the foundation.

I believe robotics and artificial intelligence and advanced materials and the architectures those technologies enable will remake the physical world as profoundly as the internet remade the digital one.  And if we do this well, then dignified shelter can become abundant. Beauty doesn’t have to be unreachably expensive. Resilience doesn’t have to be a luxury. Growth doesn’t have to mean ugliness. The places we build can fill us with wonder. And the frontier of where human beings can live does not have to end on Earth.

I want ICON's technology to shelter a billion people. I want a beautiful world. I want to see an end to the global housing crisis with my own eyes.  I want to go to the Moon, and I want to build there.  

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We Ride,

Jason Ballard

Co-Founder and CEO