Matthäi Printed Its Own HQ in 105 Hours — With Its Own Crew on the Printer

Key takeaways

A €1 billion German contractor now sells 3D printing. Matthäi Schlüsselfertigbau has opened its own construction 3D printing division, in partnership with PERI 3D Construction, after printing its own headquarters.
The building is finished and occupied. Two storeys, 364 m² (3,920 sq ft) of usable space in Selsingen, Lower Saxony. The team moved in at the start of July 2026.
105 hours is wall time, not build time. The walls of both floors took roughly 105 hours of pure printing on a COBOD BOD2, using Holcim’s TectorPrint. Foundation, base slab, floors and roof were built conventionally.
Matthäi’s own crew ran the machine. The printer came on a rental model. Staff with no prior 3D printing experience trained at PERI’s Weissenhorn base, then printed the building themselves with a single PERI supervisor on site.
That skill transfer is the actual story. Contractors are increasingly buying the capability outright rather than subcontracting the printing back to the machine’s maker.

A two-storey office, printed in Lower Saxony

Matthäi Schlüsselfertigbau has set up an in-house construction 3D printing division, and the reference project is the building it now works in. As 3D Printing Industry and TCT Magazine report, the subsidiary of Matthäi — one of Germany’s twenty largest construction groups, with more than 3,300 employees and around €1 billion in revenue — printed a two-storey office in Selsingen, Lower Saxony, and occupied it in July 2026.

The numbers are modest by headline standards and unusually solid by construction 3D printing standards. The building stands 7.4 m (24 ft) high, 22.5 m (74 ft) long and 13.5 m (44 ft) deep, offering 364 m² of usable space split 170 m² downstairs and 194 m² up. Managing director Bernd Mergard calls it “the first 3D-printed building in Northern Germany.”

What the printer did — and what it did not

Both floors’ walls took approximately 105 hours of pure printing time on a COBOD BOD2, extruding Holcim’s TectorPrint cementitious material. PERI 3D Construction, which supplied the machine and supervised the print phase, lists the gantry configuration at 24 m long, 15 m wide and 9 m high — a printer erected around the building it makes.

Everything else came from the ordinary playbook: foundation, base slab, floors and roof were built by conventional methods. That split is worth stating plainly every time, because “printed in 105 hours” gets repeated as though a finished office appeared in four days. It did not. What the figure actually shows is that the vertical envelope — historically the slowest, most labour-hungry part of a shell — stopped being the bottleneck.

The crew is the news

The detail most coverage skipped sits on PERI’s own project page. Matthäi took the BOD2 on a rental model, and its own small team did the printing. Employees with no 3D printing experience were trained partly at PERI’s headquarters in Weissenhorn and partly on site at the start of the job; only a PERI supervisor stayed on hand for technical questions.

PERI also notes how tight the run was: Matthäi approached the company just a few months before printing began, with the office due for completion by year’s end. A construction crew went from zero to operating a gantry concrete printer inside a single project schedule. That is a far more interesting claim about the technology’s maturity than any square-metre figure, and it is the obvious reason a permanent division followed.

Why contractors are buying the capability, not the service

“Matthäi printed a two-story office building and then set up its own printing division,” said Philip Lund-Nielsen, co-founder and CCO of COBOD International. “That step, from one project to an in-house capability, is exactly what we want to see. It shows construction 3D printing has moved from demonstration into everyday business.” He would say that — COBOD sells the printers — but the pattern holds elsewhere.

In April 2026, Alquist moved from pilots to production with a fourteen-unit A1 deal in which the general contractor takes ownership of the robots, financed and maintained by an equipment dealer. In Qatar, contractor UCC Holding runs two COBOD BODXL machines on the Ashghal school project itself rather than subcontracting the printing. In each case the hardware ends up with the builder. Matthäi has now bought itself a printed, occupied, two-storey showroom and a division to sell from it — prospective clients can walk through the product.

Curved walls, because formwork stopped being the tax

The form and facade came from architects Schulenburg with planning firm Mense-Korte, with the company name carried across the printed exterior and curved concrete walls framing the interior. Those geometries came straight out of the digital model. In conventional concrete work, curves like that need bespoke formwork, and the cost of that formwork is usually what kills them at the design review. Printing deletes the intermediate step, which is why curvature is the first thing architects reach for on these jobs.

“3D concrete printing allows us to completely revolutionize traditional construction processes,” said Tim Schulenburg, managing director of Schulenburg Architekten, who frames it as an entirely new sector within construction rather than a tool upgrade. Inside, as Fabbaloo observed, the walls are left raw, extrusion lines and all — still the default aesthetic of printed buildings, and increasingly a deliberate one.

FAQ

How long did the building take to print?

About 105 hours of pure printing time for the walls of both storeys. That is machine time only. The foundation, base slab, floors and roof were built conventionally, and the overall project ran across several months from first contact to occupancy in July 2026.

Is the whole building 3D printed?

No. Only the walls were printed. Construction 3D printing today handles the vertical envelope; slabs, roofs and foundations still come from traditional trades. That division of labour is what makes the project a credible template rather than a showpiece.

What material was used?

Holcim’s TectorPrint, a printable cementitious mortar formulated to hold its shape immediately after extrusion and bond to the layer below. It is not ordinary poured concrete, and the material is a large part of why printed walls stand up at all.

Do you need a specialist to operate a construction 3D printer?

Less than you might assume. Matthäi’s own staff, none of whom had 3D printing experience, printed this building after training at PERI’s Weissenhorn site and on the job, with one supervisor available for technical questions. Renting the machine with training attached is now a normal route in.

Sources: 3D Printing Industry, TCT Magazine, Fabbaloo, PERI 3D Construction.