After months of snowstorms and bone-chilling winds, spring is finally here and with it comes the promise of long, sun-soaked days and relaxing vacations. But where will you choose to spend your precious summer break? Maybe you’ll spend your time off at an overpriced theme park, standing in line for hours at a time just waiting to ride the most popular roller coasters while sweat pours down your face. Maybe you’ll spend your days trapped in a car with your family on a cross-country road trip while an unending soundtrack of screaming, arguing children plays in the background. Or maybe you’ll combine your love of relaxation and additive manufacturing and book a stay at a luxury report that was entirely 3D printed.
Famous hotelier Liz Lambert has teamed up with ICON, an advanced construction technologies company, and BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, an architecture firm, to create a 3D-printed paradise in Marfa, Texas. Using the existing El Cosmico campground as the base for the project, the team plans to move the campgrounds and increase the footprint of the property from 21 to 60 acres. The star of the show will be the 3D-printed dwellings, which utilize a variety of sculptural elements like domes, arches, vaults, and parabolic forms. According to designboom, the dwellings, which will be available in two-, three-, and four-bedroom designs and range in size from 1,200 to 2,200 square feet, will frame a shared space that offers a pool, spa, and communal facilities. The project will begin construction in 2024, but reservations will be available in summer 2023.
Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of ICON, recently said, “The truly unique and divergent architectures made possible by 3D printing are really just beginning. One of the great joys of ICON is putting our technology into the hands of great creatives and seeing what possibilities emerge. The collaboration with Liz and Bjarke is a total dream, and it’s a tremendous honor for us to join them at the forefront of design and architecture. Liz is truly the Queen of Cool and one of the national treasures of Texas. It is incredible to help her cosmic imaginings become earthly reality.”
Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Creative Director for BIG, added, “Our collaboration with El Cosmico and ICON has allowed us to pursue the formal and material possibilities of cutting-edge 3D printed construction untethered by the traditional limitations of a conventional site or client. Liz Lambert’s legacy for reimagining hospitality and her pioneering of a contemporary Texan aesthetic combined with the Minimalistic nature and culture, art and landscape of Marfa has been the perfect fit to pursue a new architectural vernacular language for El Cosmico in Marfa. Organic shapes, Euclidian circular geometries and a color palette born from the local terroir makes El Cosmico feel as if literally erected from the site it stands on. As an outpost of El Cosmico in Austin, Liz Lambert, ICON and BIG have partnered to create a permanent pavilion for music and performances. A single crescent wall emerges from the natural slope of the Long Centre’s front lawn. The adobe like color and texture of the horizontally layered wall appears like geological strata in an exposed cliff. Inspired by the Uruguayan engineer and architect Eladio Dieste, the sinuous curves at the foot of the pavilion provide both structural stability and social niches for the audience and performers. Organic form as structural function.”