F I E L DWO R K
Print Progress The nonprofit New Story teams up with designer Yves Béhar to create the world’s first 3D-printed community in Latin America.
THREE YEARS AFTER THE 2010 EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI, 24-year-old Brett Hagler traveled to the dual-nation Caribbean island of Hispaniola to help with humanitarian efforts. While working just outside Port-au-Prince, Hagler, who had previously founded a for-profit tech startup in San Francisco, was deeply struck by the children he saw living in flimsy tents and makeshift shelters without running water, electricity, or means to ensure their safety. “When I went to Haiti, I had no desire to start an organization,” Hagler says. “But what I saw down there absolutely broke my heart.” Fast-forward to today, when he serves as the cofounder and CEO of the San Francisco–based housing charity New Story, an organization poised to begin erecting the first 3D-printed community in Latin America later this year. After a week in Haiti, Hagler returned to the States with plans to get involved in a charitable organization that embraced
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emerging technology to challenge traditional nonprofit aid methods. A few months into searching for the right group, Hagler realized he hadn’t come across one that checked all the boxes. “I couldn’t find any organizations that were really prioritizing or willing to take calculated risks on innovation and new design concepts,” he says. So, like many entrepreneurs before him, Hagler decided to start his own group. Hagler enlisted cofounders Alexandria Lafci and Matthew Marshall (the three met through a social entrepreneurship group in Atlanta), and launched New Story in 2014 with the goal of helping create a world where no human is without shelter. Five years later, the organization has not only built more than 2,200 houses in Mexico, Haiti, El Salvador, and Bolivia, but is helping to facilitate some of the most exciting advances in mass housing in the past 20 years. In 2018, after a year of research and
development, New Story and ICON, an Austin, Texas–based construction technology company dedicated to revolutionizing homebuilding, announced the successful printing of the country’s first permitted 3D-printed home. A year later, the two companies unveiled plans for the world’s first 3D-printed community, which is slated for completion in an undisclosed Latin American country next year. Swiss designer Yves Béhar, founder of the San Francisco–based Fuseproject industrial design and brand firm (and a member of New Story’s advisory board), worked closely with New Story, ICON, and the future residents of the community to design functional, aesthetically pleasing houses that will serve multiple generations and could act as stepping stones out of extreme poverty. “This partnership is an example of how design, technology, and social good can combine to present new solutions to global issues,” Béhar says. “This
TERILYN STEVERSON. RENDERING COURTESY MOTIONLAND FOR NEW STORY
POWER
By RACHEL GALLAHER
