Space-saving transformational furniture isn't necessarily a new thing. We've all seen a murphy bed. And people like Graham Hill (of LifeEdited) have been designing and building out small urban apartments that magically transform for what seems like a decade. Perhaps it's even longer than that.

But I wouldn't say that robotic and transforming furniture has hit the mainstream yet. There is, however, an argument to be made that it's kind of inevitable. As the price of construction and housing continues to increase, there will be a continued push to do more with less space.

Enter companies like Ori, which offer robotic and tech-enabled furniture for both end-users, as well as developers. Ori is already in 57 buildings across the US and, at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it was also announced that they have partnered with Marriott to start rolling out their furniture in the hotel space.

This to me feels like a perfect use case.

Habitat for Humanity recently announced that they have completed, in partnership with additive construction company Alquist, the first 3D-printed owner-occupied house in the world. I'm pretty sure that I've seen other 3D-printed homes kicking around, but this is still a big deal and one of the first of such homes for Habitat for Humanity. (It also 3D-printed a house in Arizona this year, but I guess that one wasn't owner-occupied.)

The 1,200 square foot three-bedroom home is located at 129 Forest Heights Road in Williamsburg, Virginia. And it was "printed" in just 22 hours, which Habitat and Alquist are claiming reduced their construction schedule by approximately weeks compared to a traditionally framed house. Overall, this translated into an estimated savings of 15% on the total construction costs. (Again, according to Habitat and Alquist.)

These kind of savings are particularly important in many rural communities where it is not uncommon for homes to sell below their replacement cost. Not surprisingly, when you have a market dynamic like this, there's zero incentivize to build new. I mean, why would you when you can just buy something that already exists for less money, and with less risk.

Alquist uses a patented concrete to print its homes. The concrete can be left exposed, or it can be finished with traditional building materials. For any load-bearing or structural walls, I understand that they print two walls with a cavity and then use typical reinforcing bars. I would imagine that this approach is particularly helpful when lumber costs are high, but there's an obvious question around embodied carbon (concrete in lieu of wood).

Still, it's hard not to believe that we will be seeing more, rather than less, 3D-printed homes in the future.

I tweeted this out last night:

blogTO then picked it up and it got quite a bit of engagement.

Some people, okay a lot of people, used it as an opportunity to be tongue in cheek and respond with things like: cheaply built condos, boarded up Starbuckses, Hooker Harvey's, Drake's house in the Bridle Path, the crumbling Gardiner Expressway, and that McDonald's at the northwest corner of Queen and Spadina (this one is no longer a contender for me now that they've gotten rid of their walk-up window).

Of course, there were also a lot of the usual suspects: The Sky Dome, The Gooderham Building (our miniature Flatiron Building), Casa Loma, The Royal Ontario Museum (specifically the expansion by Studio Libeskind), "New City Hall", The Royal York Hotel, Honest Ed's, The St. Lawrence Market, Robarts Library (University of Toronto), and a bunch of others that you might find displayed on the seat screen on your next Air Canada flight.

But I'd like to unpack the initial question a bit more. Because what does it really mean for something to be a symbol of a city? And is there an important distinction between the symbols that resonate with locals on a personal level and the symbols that get exported around the world as a city's brand and identity? Indeed, one of the criteria in most global city rankings is a prominent and recognizable skyline. Icons are important.

Let's consider an example. I agree entirely with Sean Marshall that "New City Hall" is a deeply symbolic building. Built in the early 1960s after decades of work, New City Hall was the outcome of an international design competition. And it was decidedly modern at a time when Toronto really wasn't that modern. Montréal was the biggest and most global city in the country and multiculturalism hadn't yet become a federal mandate. And so New City Hall symbolized our genuine ambitions to becoming something more.

But does the rest of the world care? If you were to ask somebody my question on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, what would they say? What would they remember? The thing about most tall buildings or other city symbols is that they become abstractions. They turn into pictures on social media -- like logos of a company. But maybe that's all we can reasonably ask of the world. Maybe all that really matters is that a symbol has local significance; it's then up to us to export it and tell that story to the rest of the world.