<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/23/can-3-d-printing-help-solve-the-housing-crisis>
"Before Jason Ballard became an entrepreneur, he considered becoming a priest.
His speech is still peppered with the idiom of faith—
wicked, angels,
sacred—and, when he latches on to a subject he cares about, he assumes a
rousing, propulsive cadence. These days, the topic he is most evangelical about
is our broken housing system. “What we’re doing is not working,” Ballard told
me last spring. “There are far too many homeless people. Working-class people
can’t afford basic housing in regular old American cities. Construction’s too
wasteful. Houses aren’t energy-efficient enough. At the suburb scale, it’s
dystopian, almost, what we’re getting, right? We’re supposed to be the most
advanced version of humanity that’s ever existed and we can’t even meet this
basic need properly. And that means the housing of our future can’t—not
shouldn’t, but
can’t—be like the housing we have now.”
In 2017, Ballard co-founded Icon, a construction startup focussed on what he
believes to be a solution to the housing crisis: 3-D-printed construction, a
largely automated method that creates buildings layer by layer, typically with
cement-based material. The company has offices in the Yard, a mixed-use
development in a formerly industrial area of Austin, Texas. The Yard is
currently home to a sake company, a winery, a brewery, a canned-cocktail
company, a hard-seltzer manufacturer, a whiskey distillery, and a Tesla
dealership. On the morning I visited, the air was thick with the sweet-sour
smell of fermentation."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-maternal-health-india-ocean-conservation-canada-palm-oil/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
