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A tall white tower of branching printed concrete columns, lit from within at dusk, rising between houses in a mountain village
Photo: Benjamin Hofer / Nova Fundaziun Origen

Tor Alva

Mulegns, Switzerland · 2025 · Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich

A 30-metre white tower whose load-bearing columns were 3D printed in concrete, with the reinforcement placed by a second robot during printing.

Tor Alva, the White Tower, stands in Mulegns, a village of eleven inhabitants on the Julier Pass. Commissioned by the cultural foundation Nova Fundaziun Origen, it is the tallest 3D-printed building to date, and the first multi-storey structure whose load-bearing columns were printed with their reinforcement built in. The columns become thinner and more branched as the tower rises, fanning out to form a domed space at the top. The tower is designed to be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere.

How COMPAS was used

The columns were printed without formwork in the Robotic Fabrication Laboratory, ETH Zurich. One robot extruded the concrete layer by layer while a second placed ring-shaped reinforcement between the layers. The robots were controlled through COMPAS RRC, the COMPAS package for ABB robots. Che-Wei Lin presented the project at COMPAS Developer Day 2025.

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