Workers Just Started Building the World’s First 3D-Printed Hotel in the Texas Desert

Everything’s bigger in Texas, where even 3D printers take on cosmic proportions. The Lone Star State will soon be the site of the world’s first 3D-printed hotel, El Cosmico, which has just begun construction in the desert north of Marfa.

Passersby won’t see the cranes and scaffolding that typically come with construction. Photos of the site show a massive 46.5-foot-wide and 15.5-foot-tall 3D printer laying layer upon layer of sand-colored material onto the foundations, creating curvy sand-colored walls. This behemoth of a machine, called the Vulcan, was created by Texas-based 3D printing and robotics company ICON.

When the Vulcan constructs walls, it looks “like an inkjet printer with a cartridge going back and forth,” Liz Lambert, El Cosmico’s owner, tells the Big Bend Sentinel’s Mary Cantrell.

The project is a collaboration between Lambert, ICON and architects at Bjarke Ingels Group. Lambert seeks to expand the existing El Cosmico hotel, adding 43 new units and 18 residential homes on a new 40-acre property. According to a statement from ICON, 3D printing will allow for domes, arches, vaults and new versatility in architectural approaches.

“I’ve never been able to build with such little constraint and such fluidity ... just the curves, and the domes, and the parabolas,” Lambert tells Reuters’ Evan Garcia. “It’s a crazy way to build.”

Mockup images of the hotel’s interior show cream curvilinear walls and rounded wooden surfaces full of colors that reflect the surrounding desert. In addition to the hotel, El Cosmico will include several 3D-printed homes, which are currently priced for upwards of $2.29 million. Reuters reports that the hotel units will cost between $200 and $450 per night.

The structures’ walls are made of a concrete called “lavacrete,” a proprietary low-carbon material created by ICON, which has a compressive strength of 2,000 to 3,500 pounds per square inch. The mixture also uses local Texas materials pigmented to “blend with the landscape of Marfa,” as Lambert tells the Big Bend Sentinel.

ICON was founded in 2018, and its technology has since been used to build 3D-printed homes in Texas and Mexico. The company is also constructing 100 homes in Georgetown, Texas, where residents have commented on the strength of their walls and their insulation from the Texas sun, per Reuters.

Beyond printing houses and hotels, the company has looked to new horizons. A few years ago, ICON unveiled Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed environment that simulates conditions on the Red Planet’s surface; four volunteers recently completed a year-long mission inside the structure. In 2022, NASA awarded ICON a $57 million contract to support Project Olympus, which is exploring ways to build 3D-printed structures on the moon using locally available materials.

Back on Earth, this 3D-printing technology has the potential to help address America’s affordable housing crisis. In 2020, ICON constructed several houses for the Community First! Village in Austin, a program for people experiencing chronic homelessness run by the nonprofit Mobile Loaves & Fishes.

In the future, the expansion of El Cosmico may include affordable housing for hotel staff. Lambert tells the Big Bend Sentinel that these plans are “in the background” but still moving forward.

Construction on the new hotel is scheduled to conclude in 2026, and the existing location will be open until 2025.

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Olatunji Osho-Williams is an intern with Smithsonian magazine.