Are ICFs a brand-new system?
Yes and no. ICF construction offers the best of the old and the new. Concrete has been used as a residential building material for centuries in many countries around the world, and in commercial buildings in North America for a long time. As far back as the turn of the last century, Thomas Edison designed concrete houses using cast iron forms. But the development of ICF is recent. Stay-in place insulating concrete forms were invented by a Canadian in 1966. Since then, ICF construction has slowly but surely moved into the mainstream of the residential construction industry. More than 40,000 ICF homes have been built in North America since the early 1990s, and these days the number of committed ICF builders and enthusiastic homeowners is growing rapidly.
