Big Retail Hops On 3D-Printed Construction Craze — But Some Warn Hope Is Colliding With Hype

Robots that spawn cement walls layer by layer have built homes in Houston, apartment blocks in Germany and a train station in Japan.

Now, 3D printing has caught the fancy of two of the world's most iconic retail corporations, Starbucks and Walmart, which both debuted 3D-printed facilities to great fanfare in recent months. 

Advocates of the technology say it's faster and cheaper than traditional construction methods. And with big retail buy-in, 3D-printed construction has officially gone mainstream.

But that doesn't make it a smart bet just yet for most commercial real estate developers, according to engineering experts who worry 3D-printed construction can't deliver on the promises its boosters are making.

Over the past several weeks, high-profile projects employing 3D printing have multiplied.

Walmart used a 3D printing system from RIC Robotics to build the walls at two new facilities in Alabama and Tennessee over the past year, formally unveiling its 5,000 SF 3D-printed Supercenter expansion in Owens Cross, Alabama, just last week. 

Starbucks enlisted equipment from Peri 3D Construction to build a Brownsville, Texas, store that was completed last month.

“For the first time, we’re not talking about the ‘potential’ of 3D printing — we have delivered real savings in time and labor,” RIC founder Ziyou Xu said of the Walmart projects. “Robotic 3D construction is a commercially viable solution for large-scale developments.”

Few disagree that the technology has potential. But whether the era of mass-produced 3D cement-printed building has arrived is up for debate, with some in the field openly concerned it is being overhyped and the public might turn on it if those promises can’t be delivered.

“People are overselling this technology and the media is buying it,” said University of Southern California Professor Lucio Soibelman.

“I would like them to be more transparent with people,” said Penn State Professor Ali Memari, who helms the school’s Pennsylvania Housing Research Center. “We don’t want to create too much expectation … It can damage the industry in the future.”

'Box Building'

Xu sees the technology as a solution to the U.S. construction industry’s glaring labor shortage. The nation needs to attract 439,000 new workers to the sector this year to keep up with demand.

“Young people don’t want to move cement around all day, but they do want to play with a giant robot,” Xu said.

The RIC Robotics founder has been working on 3D printing technology since he was a student at Tsinghua University in China in 2016. He then went to Columbia University for a masters in architecture but dropped out in 2021 to start the company.

RIC’s 3D printing technology has made big advances in recent months, Xu said.

Its work on the first Walmart project — an 8K SF addition in Athens, Tennessee, completed in collaboration with Alquist 3D — required 30 workers and took 45 days to complete.

“The structural design wasn't as optimized as it could be,” Xu said. “There was a big learning curve.”

RIC’s next Walmart project, the 5K SF warehouse in Alabama, required just five workers who completed the project in seven days, including equipment setup time. It delivered two weeks ahead of schedule in February.

Xu declined to share a construction price for the Walmart projects but did tell Bisnow that RIC’s rail-mounted 3D-printing systems can be leased for about $9K per month.

“They are box-building basically,” Memari said. “It’s just a huge concrete box and then the roofs are trusses.”

That's where skepticism creeps in.

Walls only account for about 20% of the cost of a new building, Soibelman said. The rest of the project, including the roof and other finishes, need to be carried out by laborers.

“It is what I would call half-automated,” Memari said. “The rest of the construction is traditional.”

Installing rebar adds another layer of complexity to the process. Printing needs to be paused so workers can place it by hand.

“You need to drop rebar into some cells and fill them with grout,” Memari said.

Most 3D printers can’t accommodate aggregate, the pieces of stone added to cement to turn it into concrete, Soibelman said. Without the aggregate occupying some of the volume, the budget for a project can quickly balloon.

“Cement is more expensive than timber,” said Soibelman, who added that despite claims of sustainability, 3D-printed construction is not very green.

“Cement is one of the most unsustainable materials,” he said.

An Answer To The Housing Crisis?

Boosters of 3D cement printing believe they can most make a difference in the residential sector.

“I look at this as an answer to the housing crisis,” said H2M Senior Vice President Kevin Paul, who partnered with SQ4D to build a 3D-printed home on Long Island in 2021.

H2M's budget for labor and materials was between 30% to 40% lower than what it would have been to construct a traditional stick-built house at the time, Paul said.

The figure doesn’t include the cost of the 3D-printing equipment.

That's a major expense, but it can be offset if the same piece of equipment is used to print dozens of homes in a standardized, Levittown suburb-building fashion, Paul said.

But that isn't how it's playing out so far.

Icon Build is a Texas company that’s made a name for itself 3D printing cement homes, completing the last of 100 such houses in Wolf Ranch near Austin last summer. 

But instead of building inexpensive homes for the working class, it has highlighted the cool factor.

“They are not really selling it as a low-cost solution,” Soibelman said. “They are selling it as a science-fiction solution for people who want to buy something cool.”

The homes printed by Icon and similar companies don’t resemble the traditional suburban bungalows many buyers are looking for, some say. Buyers shouldn’t expect crown moldings or other custom details that would be easy to accommodate through the traditional construction process.

“Clients have to buy in,” Paul said. “When you tell people you have limited finishes, they kind of have to be on board.”

Lack of customization has also been a detriment to modular housing, another lauded form of construction technology that never quite took off as expected, Memari said.

“People like custom homes,” he said. “The conventional home industry has a lot of flexibility.”

Yet if 3D-printed structures can be built at scale on a tight budget, Paul thinks they could be appealing to the right demographic.

“If you look at someone who’s living in a roach-infested apartment in Brooklyn, they’d be very happy, for the most part, with a three-bedroom concrete house with a decent kitchen and two nice bathrooms,” he said. “Are Hamptons clients going to be looking at 3D printing? Absolutely not.”

Texas has looser building codes than the Northeast markets Paul generally works in, which makes it easier to build 3D-printed structures.

But even there, Icon still installs insulation in its homes. To do that, Soibelman said the company prints two separate walls and places an insulating foam between them.

“It’s double the work, double the materials,” the professor said.

Niche Applications

Cement may be unsustainable from a construction perspective, but it does provide some major benefits in a world contending with climate change.

Paul sees 3D-printed homes as better suited to flood-prone areas than stick-frame structures since cement is less likely than wood to rot or wash away. In some cases, evacuees could return after a storm and simply rinse out their homes with a garden hose.

Concrete is also more heat-resistant than many other materials, which makes it a good fit for fire-prone markets like Los Angeles. The labor-saving nature of 3D printing means it could be implemented as homeowners rebuild there, Soibelman said.

“I’m not against the technology,” he said.

It is already beating traditional molds when it comes to creating complex curves out of concrete, the professor said. He's also excited about tire-mounted printing technologies that will allow cement to be printed down without cumbersome rail systems.

Memari believes the technology is also well-suited to tiny home construction.

Most buildings in the U.S. are too large to have a 3D-printed roof, but that's not the case for tiny homes, the professor said.

Cement roofs can't maintain their structure if they go up at the same mellow angle as traditional roofs, which means they would need to be exceptionally tall when they come to a point at the top. But tiny homes can accommodate the steeper angle at a more manageable height.

Memari and Soibelman agree that the public’s expectations need to be in line with what the technology can actually deliver.

“We need to do more research,” Soibelman said.