Buildings 2.0 Library
Conversations on the future of the built environment
81 episodes of the Buildings 2.0 podcast, each bound as a short book: the ideas, the numbers and the lines worth keeping.
Season 2, Episode 23 /Jan 16, 2026
What the space architect behind ICON's 3D-printed homes discovered designing for Mars
Melodie Yashar, Aenara
Jan 16, 2026 /Construction & Delivery
What the space architect behind ICON's 3D-printed homes discovered designing for Mars
Melodie Yashar is a space architect who helped ICON, the Texas company that 3D-prints houses, build the pipeline that printed hundreds of homes, and who has designed habitats for Mars with NASA-funded teams. She now runs her own studio, Aenara. She is the most candid voice on what 3D printing actually solves in housing, and what it does not.
Melodie Yashar, Founder, Aenara
In this conversation
What changed in Melodie's thinking between graduate school and running a design-build pipeline at ICON.
The lesson from Mars: resource constraint as sustainability on steroids, and coordination as the whole game.
Why permitting a printed house is slow for good reason, and what an owner and builder need to understand before choosing it.
Her advice to anyone drawn to designing for space: where to start, and how to know when the work is not aligned with the problem you care about.
It's the same thing, but maybe just 10 times more intense in space, where every activity, every task, every operation needs to be planned, coordinated ahead of time.
Melodie Yashar
Chapters
What changed since grad school
How her view of housing evolved from school to the factory floor.
Lessons from Mars
What designing for Mars teaches about building on Earth.
Housing ten years from now
The honest state of 3D-printed housing, ten years out.
By the numbers
Net new construction workers the U.S. needs each year, beyond normal hiring
Melodie says printing solves 60 percent of the house and trades must finish the rest. The trades are the constraint.
Source: Associated Builders and Contractors workforce model (2025) ↗Founding Aenara
Why Melodie founded her own studio.
AI and the design intersections
Where AI fits in coordination and design for printed structures.
The reality is that 3D printing only solves, let's say, 60% of the problem.
Melodie Yashar
Takeaways
3D printing solves roughly 60 percent of the housing problem. Plumbing, electrical and roofing are still done by hand, and the delta between the two speeds is where the promise gets lost.
Robotic construction assumes no crew is there to fix problems, so every operation is planned and tested first. Space is the same discipline, ten times more intense.
Twenty bespoke projects push time and cost up sharply. The industrialized home product that delivers customization at no penalty does not exist yet.
They want to have some better guarantees that their project is going to get permitted in a shorter amount of time.
Melodie Yashar