?Everybody's dream is you hit the button and boom, your house pops out? At home late one night, an energy drink in one hand, the 3Doodler pen in the other, Platt Boyd had his breakthrough. Like hot glue from a gun, the molten plastic secreted by the 3Doodler hardens as it cools, which allows the user to draw 3D shapes. Boyd drew a small scaffold, an object that crudely represented the three-dimensional diagrams of compounds a high school student might study in chemistry class. When it solidified, he set one book on top of it. Then another, and another. Eventually the tiny 3D object he had created minutes before was holding up 18 pounds of books. It weighed half an ounce.

At the time, Boyd was a partner at a regional architecture firm based in Birmingham, Alabama, doing what everyday architects do: dreaming up boundary-stretching designs without a shot at ever seeing them built. ?What I as an architect wanted to have was the freedom to design things like all these starchitects,? he says. ?All of these normal architects are frustrated because the building technology isn?t there to realize it unless you have these huge budgets.? Using normal building materials, the sort of design freedom Boyd wanted could cost between $800 and $1,000 a square foot, by his own estimate, or even more. But that night in 2014, doodling with a children?s toy, Boyd saw a way to make the designs in his head a reality.
Boyd envisioned a 3Doodler pen on a massive scale. Constructing a free-form...