There’s a list you don’t often see Switzerland topping: “Place Most Likely to Host a 30-Meter Sci-Fi Monolith Built by Swarms of Robots.” Yet, as E&T Magazine describes, Mulegns—a mountain village with a population that could hold their annual meeting in a minivan—now boasts the world’s tallest 3D-printed building: Tor Alva, or “White Tower” in Romansh. If the phrase “the world’s tallest 3D-printed building” feels both inevitable and faintly ridiculous, it’s worth pausing to admire just how oddly beautiful and forward-thinking this structure really is.
Concrete, Wires, and a Patch of Mountain Air
Tor Alva rises 30 meters (about 98 feet). According to Travel + Leisure Asia, the structure went up in a town with only eleven residents—a crowd more suited for a poker night than a grand architectural debut. The partnership behind the building, ETH Zurich and the Origen cultural foundation, set out to inject some life—and perhaps a healthy dose of spectacle—into an area flirting with obscurity. Their hopes? That this blend of high-tech artistry and cultural programming would transform Mulegns into something more than a footnote.
Function is one question; form is another. Tor Alva is made up of 32 sculpted white concrete columns. These lift and twist upward, branching at the top to create a domed, tree-like cupola—a design that Hypebeast notes was generated by algorithms handling both ornamentation and structural integrity. The outcome looks less like an attempt to one-up Brutalism, more like the fever dream of an algorithm enthralled by Gothic cathedrals and fractals.
Interestingly, the building’s design and purpose aren’t random. As E&T elaborates, the White Tower isn’t just art—it’s an experiment meant to lure visitors, serve as an event hall, and infuse fading community spirit into the landscape. Mulegns may not have gotten a train station or a tech startup, but it got something arguably more unexpected: a monument to digital construction and hope.
Robots That Know When to Squeeze, and When to Reinforce
Building a tower with a printer doesn’t just mean pointing a nozzle skyward and waiting. As E&T details, the construction required an industrial robot to apply the concrete layer by bespoke layer, skipping traditional casting molds altogether. To achieve the delicate yet stable structure, a specially developed concrete mixture had to strike a careful balance: soft enough to shape those intricate, droplet-textured details, but strong enough to harden rapidly and support everything stacked above.
The technical wizardry didn’t stop there. Every 20 centimeters, a second robot inserted a ring-shaped reinforcement into the column-in-progress, supplementing these with steel rods (rebars) afterward. The researchers at ETH Zurich developed a new method to reliably test the load-bearing capacity of this unusual formulation, addressing a longstanding challenge in 3D-printed construction, according to E&T. Five months of robotic printing at the ETH Hönggerberg campus yielded the individual segments, which were then transported—by heavy goods vehicle and via the winding Juniper Road—to Mulegns for on-site assembly, as Travel + Leisure Asia documents.
The process isn’t just about dazzling visitors with tech for tech’s sake; the approach is a step toward sustainable, custom, and low-waste building. The question of how local cows might react to robots rolling through their alpine pasture for such purposes, however, appears unaddressed.
Why Here? Why Now? And Will It Move?
Reflecting on Tor Alva’s broader significance, Giovanni Netzer, founder of the Origen foundation, expressed his fascination with the project’s interplay between digital design, cultural memory, and artistic form. He remarked at the opening ceremony, as highlighted by E&T, that “the White Tower is more than a technical triumph – it inspires the building sector, encourages sustainable tourism and offers new cultural space. It also gives a fading village a new chance. That’s extraordinary.” The project’s location in Mulegns—and the decision to make it fully deconstructible—are as much about revitalizing place as celebrating possibility.
“Movable” is a literal feature here. As Travel + Leisure Asia notes, the entire structure is designed to be dismantled and reassembled. The plan is for the tower to remain in Mulegns for about five years, drawing tours and summer performances atop the cupola before being relocated, perhaps to another unsuspecting Swiss town, perhaps somewhere entirely new. For now, Mulegns gets not just a landmark but a limited-engagement experiment in hospitality, tourism, and architectural bravado.
Will this temporary monument—a structure both far more lasting than a circus tent and somehow just as ephemeral—do for Mulegns what countless statues of local luminaries never quite did? It’s a question that lingers above the treeline.
The Upshot: Concrete Poetry, One Layer at a Time
Not every architectural advance comes wrapped around raw pragmatism. Sometimes, as Tor Alva demonstrates, a little technological whimsy is allowed to take center stage. Here is a tower with robot-etched forms and a calculated hopefulness, dropped improbably onto an Alpine slope, quietly refuting the idea that innovation must always seek a utilitarian justification.
The tower doesn’t promise to solve worldwide housing woes or singlehandedly redefine urban planning. Instead, it throws down a gauntlet—one composed, fittingly, of algorithmically orchestrated concrete: what if tomorrow’s built environment is shaped as much by curiosity and cultural intent as by efficiency? There’s a sly optimism in the idea. Why else print a skyscraper for a village with just eleven inhabitants, if not to see what happens next?
So, is a global deluge of 3D-printed towers just around the corner, or is Mulegns destined to keep this eccentric gem all to itself—at least, until the five-year clock tolls? One suspects that, thanks to the building’s modularity and flair for reinvention, Tor Alva’s story is only in its first chapter. The next stop on this concrete curiosity’s world tour is anyone’s guess.
