Burn It All Down

How we lost our headquarters and engineering lab in a fire-and gained a lot more in the process.

- By Jason Ballard

"Icon is on fire."

The phone call woke me in the early morning of the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Even though it was still dark out, I had enough mental clarity to know that our COO meant it literally and not figuratively.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"Bad."

All told, two buildings-our headquarters and our engineering lab-were destroyed by the fire, along with almost everything inside them. Just days earlier, we had made headlines when we announced we were building one of the largest communities of 3-D-printed homes in the world, in partnership with one of the nation's largest developers, Lennar, and one of the world's top architectural firms, Bjarke Ingels Group. And we were planning to make an equally large announcement in just a few days more: a $57.2 million contract with NASA to develop technologies capable of printing infrastructure on the moon. We'd all gone home for the holiday with a little extra swagger in our step-and now this. It was a gut punch.

Inside the buildings-where dozens of us had worked daily to develop technologies to help us attack the global housing crisis-were the many and various tools of our trade: architectural plans, computers, vacuum chambers, lasers, material samples, and our primary indoor engineering test stand. There was also a lot of sentimental stuff from the five years we had been in business: mementos from the journey, the first 3-D printer we ever built, notes from customers, early prototypes, and experiments that became the foundation for today's major projects.