Adam Savage Unveils The Giant Robot Army That's 3D Printing Entire Houses
Adam Savage just got a mind-blowing inside look at the 3D printed house revolution. He unveils the giant robot printers from Icon that are building entire homes, and the technology is bigger and crazier than you can imagine.
Forget everything you know about 3D printing. Forget the tiny plastic trinkets and desktop toys. Adam Savage, the beloved host of "Tested" and the internet’s favorite mad scientist, just took his viewers on a jaw-dropping journey to Austin, Texas, and what he found there is poised to shatter the very foundations of modern construction. Standing in front of a colossal machine that dwarfs him, Savage declared, “Behind me is the largest 3D printer you or I have ever seen.” And its main job? It prints houses.
This isn’t some far-flung futuristic fantasy; this is happening right now. In a sprawling facility aptly named "Printland," the company Icon is deploying a fleet of giant robots that are literally printing full-scale, permanent homes out of concrete. In a viral new video on the Adam Savage’s Tested channel, Savage gets a mind-blowing inside look at this technological revolution, and it’s even wilder than you can imagine.
“Picture the FDM printer you have at home,” an Icon employee tells a visibly giddy Savage. “More or less the same thing, just a different material in a totally different scale.”
That different material is a proprietary cementitious mix they call “Carbon X,” and the scale is, frankly, insane. We’re talking about machines that extrude perfectly uniform beads of concrete, layer by layer, to build the walls of a house in a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months. And these aren’t just prototypes. Icon is “north of 200 permitted structures,” with people already living in these incredible 3D printed houses.
“This is a tectonic shift,” a construction industry analyst, who asked to remain anonymous, revealed to DeetsDaily. “The traditional methods of home building—wood, nails, drywall—haven’t fundamentally changed in a century. Icon isn’t just improving the process; they’re rewriting the rulebook. This is the future of construction, happening before our eyes.”
The workhorse of their operation is the Vulcan printer, a massive gantry-style system that has been building homes at scale. But Savage was there to see the next giant leap: a revolutionary new printer named Phoenix.
Phoenix is a beast. It’s a gargantuan, multi-jointed robotic arm that looks like something straight out of a sci-fi blockbuster. Its goal is to make the 3D printing of concrete houses even faster and more mobile. The old gantry system, while fast at printing, was laborious to set up and take down. Phoenix, on the other hand, can be driven onto a site on tracks like a bulldozer, level itself on a grade, and start printing. The team at Icon estimates it could cut down setup and teardown time by a factor of four.
But the real magic is in the details. Savage’s deep dive reveals that Icon has achieved something previously thought impossible in construction: they’ve replaced rebar. Instead of manually placing steel rods, the Phoenix printer nozzle feeds a continuous stream of aircraft-grade steel cable inside the bead of concrete as it’s being printed.
“It’s a composite panel,” one of Icon’s engineers explains, holding up a cross-section of the wall. “This spreads out the load and spreads out the strength… it’s very useful for shrinkage cracking.”
This is the kind of innovation that has insiders buzzing. “To embed reinforcement in real-time is the holy grail,” our source continued. “It removes one of the most time-consuming and labor-intensive parts of concrete work. It’s not just an improvement; it’s a paradigm shift.”
To prove the capabilities of their new robot, the Icon team didn’t just print a box. They created the “House of Phoenix,” a breathtaking, 30-foot-tall, 100-foot-long structure with no straight lines, meant to evoke the flowing walls of Antelope Canyon. It was the very first thing the Phoenix prototype ever printed, a high-stakes gamble to see if the technology would even work. The result is a stunning piece of architecture that hints at a future free from “cookie-cutter” housing developments.
“Part of the cool stuff about 3D printing is not only that it could be faster and cheaper, but also that you have a tremendous amount of design freedom,” says Icon’s Jason Ballard. “Imagine the world when things like this are faster and cheaper than boxes.”
Throughout the video, Adam Savage’s infectious enthusiasm is palpable. He marvels at the 3D-printed nozzles that can be iterated on daily, the complex software that has pushed beyond the limits of G-code, and the sheer, mesmerizing spectacle of watching a house materialize from the ground up.
As the tour concludes, the implications are staggering. Icon is not just building houses; they are building a new future for housing. One where homes are more affordable, more resilient, and architecturally boundless. The giant robot army is here, and it’s building the world of tomorrow, one concrete layer at a time.
What do you think? Would you live in a 3D printed house? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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