Wildfires are becoming an increasingly expensive and emotionally devastating experience for people living in fire-prone areas. As of June 27, 2025, the National Interagency Fire Center had already recorded almost 34,000 fires, well above the 10-year average of 26,406 fires. Due to the growing threat from wildfires, innovative technology is being developed to help people in these areas survive and even thrive in the aftermath. One such tech that may ultimately play a big part in both making wildfire-prone areas easier to live in and the cleanup afterward much easier is 3D-printed homes.
[Read: Can You Build a Fireproof Home?]
What Makes 3D-Printed Homes Uniquely Suited to Fire-Prone Areas?
Areas where fire has ravaged whole neighborhoods can be sobering to see firsthand, especially for people who have to rebuild their lives in the aftermath. They can also make future homes harder to insure, which puts homeowners in an even worse position. That’s why, in areas like Altadena, California, city planners and home builders alike are trying to create homes that not only house displaced people but also potentially prevent major future displacements.
And although a traditionally stick-built home can be safe during a wildfire, there may be better options for homeowners at risk. Don Ajamian, owner and CEO of Emergent Construction in Reading, California, is one homebuilder helping to restore Altadena. His observations in the devastated city are encouraging for 3D printed homes, which are often made from concrete mixes.
“Driving around Altadena today, what you would see are homes that have burned down, except for a three-quarter to one-inch layer of stucco that is often still standing,” says Ajamian. “The studs that were holding it up are gone, they’re burned away. So that tells a story to me. If that stucco would have been the structure holding the roof up, maybe that structure would have survived.”
He’s not the only one who is paying close attention to the potential of 3D-printed homes. Some insurance experts suspect that in a real-world fire, 3D-printed homes made from concrete may be extremely fire-resistant.
“You’re creating a house that may not need much, if any, in the way of wood or nails, so there’s nothing to burn,” says Greg Scoblete, principal on the Emerging Issues Team at Verisk, a company that provides data solutions for the insurance industry, based in Jersey City, New Jersey. “There’s much more fire resistance there. These structures tend to be very well insulated, very airtight, so it’s much harder for embers, at least in theory, to penetrate these homes.”
[Read: How Climate Change Could Impact Your Home Value]
Testing 3D-Printed Homes for Fire Resilience
Although no 3D-printed homes built in the last decade have yet been exposed to wildfire conditions, as far as anyone is aware, 3D homebuilder ICON decided to test its homes using a standard called ASTM E119, which is meant to determine how long structures can endure extreme temperatures before failing.
ICON tested both load-bearing walls, such as the ones on the outside of their homes, as well as non-load-bearing walls, which are typically found inside homes between rooms.
“There are two aspects when it comes to wildfires: first, is the material combustible? And then, what is the fire rating from a building code perspective?” says Bungane Mehlomakulu, director of building science and building performance at Icon in Austin, Texas. “For our standard load-bearing wall, the wall that is around the exterior of the homes, it has a nearly three-hour fire rating. We came in at 178 minutes. But, from a building code perspective, we say that’s a two-hour fire rating. For that test, it’s not that flames are firing through the other side, it’s actually just about how hot the temperature is on the other side. So, if there was some combustible material that was up against the wall, would it catch fire?”
“We’ve also tested our non-load bearing walls, which are usually used on the interior of the homes — it’s a slightly different configuration,” says Mehlomakulu. “Those had almost a two-hour rating. They came in at 108 minutes, so from a code perspective, it’s a 90-minute rating. This is our standard performance for our out-of-the-box wall system. If there’s an active fire much closer to the home, it helps increase the chance that there isn’t loss of property.”
[Read: Fire Safety Tips for Your Home]
Rebuilding Fire-Ravaged Areas With 3D-Printed Homes
In areas that have been completely ravaged by wildfires, like LA, 3D printing offers some advantages over stick-built homes. According to Ajamian, the number of man-hours required to finish a home can be reduced, as well as the number of people needed on the job, allowing construction crews to be spread more thinly across an area and speed up the rebuilding process. There are other significant advantages in this area, where supply chains may be disrupted and access to materials limited.
“From a rebuilding perspective, one of the challenges can be the supply chains that exist and their supply constraints,” says Mehlomakulu. “For additive construction, another one of the benefits ends up being that we have a relatively few number of component parts that actually go into the printing of the system, and that all speaks to the logistics of being able to basically arrive with the same set of material and move through and work with different homeowners in the same community to mobilize the robot to different sites.”
And while buildings that may survive a little longer, lower labor requirements to get homeowners back into their homes, easier access to supplies and the hope of faster construction in damaged neighborhoods are all great reasons to implement 3D printed homes in wildfire areas, there’s one more reason that is a lot more personal.
Ajamian, who worked in fire-ravaged areas before the LA wildfires, always wants to give his homeowners something special. That’s so much easier to accomplish with a 3D printer, since each home is printed individually, and cookie-cutter homes don’t really create significant efficiency gains. In fact, homes with curves and other interesting architectural details sometimes make more sense for a 3D home printer.
“In these recovery situations, we do something custom and special for every individual,” says Ajamian. “I would love it if in five or 10 years, they can look back and say, ‘Boy, that was awful, but look at what we got out of the other end.’ It’s hard to think that way from this side of the fire right now, but eventually, that’s always our hope.”
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Using 3D Printing in Fire Prone Areas originally appeared on usnews.com
