Tor Alva: A 30-Metre 3D-Printed White Tower Built to Save a Swiss Village of 11 People, and Then Move Away

A record-setting concrete tower on the Julier Pass was designed from its first bolt to be taken apart around 2030, which turns a village landmark into something closer to a portable asset.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-10-04

At its unveiling in May 2025, a helicopter lifted a silver protective membrane off a tower in Mulegns, a pass village with eleven residents, and revealed what its backers call the tallest 3D-printed building in the world. Tor Alva, Romansh for White Tower, rises about 30 metres, or 98 feet, from the footprint of an old coach house beside the road to the Julier Pass. About 300 guests watched, among them Swiss Federal Councillor Guy Parmelin and ETH Zurich president Joel Mesot. The tower was commissioned to rescue a dying place, yet it was built with an expiry date: roughly five years in Mulegns, then disassembly and a new life somewhere else.

A village that exported sugar and imported villas

Mulegns sits on the northwest ramp of the Julier Pass in the canton of Graubunden. In the coaching era it was the stop where horses were changed on the 13-hour journey from Chur to St. Moritz, and a fifth horse was hitched on for the steep climb to the summit. The real money came from emigration. Families such as the Jegher and the Poltera left for Bordeaux, opened cafes and patisseries, and came home to build themselves stately houses. The Weisse Villa dates to 1856, the Rothaus to 1858, and the Post Hotel Lowe to around 1830.

Then the traffic moved on. Roughly 140 people lived in Mulegns around 1900, and Netzer has put the figure nearer 150. ETH counted eleven at the unveiling, though other accounts say twelve, thirteen or fourteen, and the discrepancy is itself a measure of how small the numbers have become. The tower's profile is meant to be read against that history: ETH describes the form as an ornate layered cake, a nod to the confectioners who carried Graubunden pastry craft across Europe.

The foundation that keeps buying the village

The client is Nova Fundaziun Origen, the cultural foundation built around theatre director Giovanni Netzer, who grew up in the Val Surses. Origen launched in 2006 and its conversion of existing buildings in neighbouring Riom earned the Wakker Prize in 2018. It had already put a red theatre tower on the summit of the Julier Pass, where it stood for several years, so a second tower was a continuation rather than a leap.

In 2019 Origen bought the Post Hotel Lowe and launched a rescue campaign for Mulegns, asking donors for CHF 3.1 million by mid-August of that year to save the hotel and the Weisse Villa. The villa was later moved a few metres to widen the road and open a small village square. The hotel reopened on 6 June 2024 after about CHF 6 million of investment, backed by roughly 600 donors, with CHF 380,000 from the canton of Graubunden. Netzer has said the foundation itself has no money and lives on supporters, and he has pointed to about a dozen jobs the hotel would create in a village of a dozen people. The tower project was formally launched on 22 June 2021, when it was priced at about CHF 3.5 million.

How to print a building that can come apart

The architects are Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger, professor of digital building technologies at ETH Zurich, who completed a 3D-printed room back in 2013. The structure is 32 branching columns, eight on each of four levels, topped by a double dome and a 32-seat cupola theatre eight metres high. It holds 124 printed elements made of about 2,500 concrete layers, each 10 millimetres high, with a total robot path of roughly 250 kilometres and about 900 hours of printing. Column fabrication began in January 2024 at ETH's Hoenggerberg campus and took five months.

The hard part was making printed concrete carry load. ETH materials professor Robert Flatt developed a mix soft enough to bond delicate forms yet quick enough to harden under the next layer, with two additives blended in just before the nozzle to produce a droplet relief. A second robot then pressed a ring of steel reinforcement into the growing column at intervals of roughly 20 to 26 centimetres, supplemented by vertical rebar added after printing. Structural engineering professor Walter Kaufmann and his team devised a test method for the layered material, because no standards existed for reinforcing load-bearing printed elements. The project cites concrete savings of 40 to 50 percent against conventional casting.

Reversibility was designed in. Two-metre sections were joined into full columns at a warehouse in Savognin, base and capital pieces were cast in 3D-printed moulds, and everything was trucked up the pass. Connections use removable screws and post-tensioning cables rather than adhesive, and the skin is a removable membrane. Delivering, hoisting and bolting a full storey took a single day, and the fourth and final level went up by crane on 30 September 2024. Dillenburger described the exercise as trialling a method of circular construction.

What a first of its kind costs

The schedule slipped repeatedly. Parmelin was originally due to open the tower in late June 2024; that moved to September and finally to May 2025. Causes included climate demands at 1,500 metres above sea level, redesigns to use less material, and the discovery of naturally occurring asbestos at the site. The municipality of Surses approved the zoning change the tower needed.

The bill rose from about CHF 3.5 million in 2021 to CHF 4.1 million by 2023 and CHF 4.4 million at completion, with roughly CHF 500,000 still unfunded on opening day, according to Netzer. Public bodies, foundations, companies and private donors paid for it, and research costs were backed separately by the Escher Circle at the ETH Foundation. Netzer told the Swiss news agency Keystone-SDA that it was the most complicated undertaking in Origen's 20-year history. About forty people worked on it over seven years.

Entry is controlled. Origen says the tower can be visited only on extended guided tours or at performances in the dome, and the winter 2025-26 tour cost CHF 100 per person, which the foundation framed partly as a contribution to the build. For a 32-seat theatre, that is a hospitality product more than a ticketed attraction.

A landmark with a transfer window

The project timeline lists planned disassembly for 2030. According to Netzer, five Graubunden municipalities had already expressed interest in hosting the tower by opening day. That is where the real estate logic starts. A host would not be buying land or lettable floor area; it would be acquiring a proven destination anchor with a world-record claim, a tested structural method and a known assembly sequence of about one day per storey.

The limits are just as concrete. What moves is the printed superstructure. The historic coach house that carries it stays in Mulegns, so a new owner must supply a base, secure zoning and a building permit, and find an operator capable of programming a tiny venue. No relocation budget or host site has been announced. Economically, Tor Alva is a prototype funded by philanthropy and research money, not a yield-producing asset, and the template of a dying village, a cultural foundation, a research university and a record-setting folly depends heavily on having someone like Netzer at the centre of it.

There are critics. Netzer acknowledged that a few villagers feel the tower has nothing to do with Mulegns, and a 2019 commentary in the architecture magazine Hochparterre noted that Origen's rescue prospectus never blamed the road and the car for the village's decline. Both points frame the open question: a monument can draw visitors, but it cannot by itself bring back permanent residents.

The test comes after the tower leaves

Netzer said at the opening that the tower gives a fading village a new chance. By the project's own schedule, that chance has a clock on it. When the columns come down around 2030, what stays in Mulegns will be the restored hotel, the moved villa, the coach house base and whatever habits of visiting the tower has built. Those are real estate assets with ordinary economics, and they will have to hold their value without a 30-metre landmark in the middle of them.

For the next host, the equation is the mirror image. A municipality that takes Tor Alva gets the headline and the engineering, and inherits the same questions Mulegns faced: who pays for the unfunded half million, who runs the stage, and what the village looks like the day after the cranes leave. Whether a relocatable landmark is a new asset class or a one-off will be decided by the second site, not the first.