Europe’s largest 3D printed apartment building completed in France

Home-Europe’s largest 3D printed apartment building completed in France

PERI 3D Construction, a company focused on 3D concrete printing for the construction sector, has completedViliaSprint²in Bezannes, France, a three-story residential building described by the project team as Europe’s largest 3D printed multi-family apartment building. Developed byPlurial Novilia, a French social housing provider and subsidiary of Action Logement, the project delivers 12 social housing apartments across 800 m² of living space. Using aCOBOD BOD2 3Dconstruction printer, the team said the overall project timeline was reduced by three months compared with conventional construction.

Project data released by the partners shows that the shell was completed in 34 effective printing days, compared with 50 originally planned. Results from a near-identical building constructed on the same site using conventional methods showed that shell construction time was cut in half. The printed structure also required three site operators, compared with six for the conventional shell. Waste fell from 10% to 5%. Project figures also stated that a 5 cm layer height, 2.5 times higher than the layer height used, would have reduced printing time for the full 800 m² structure to 14 days.

ViliaSprint² is described by the project team as the first building in France where both the load-bearing structure and all walls were printed directly on site. PERI 3D Construction operated the COBOD BOD2 gantry system, which extruded concrete layer by layer to produce the shell. Holcim, a building materials company, supplied the printable concrete through its TectorPrint technology. That material was reinforced with synthetic macro fibres and formulated within the company’s CO₂-reduced ECOPact range. Printing began in March 2025 and finished ahead of schedule after the team optimized the sequence for installing prefabricated floor slabs, halving the number of times the print gantry had to be repositioned.

Jérôme Florentin, Director of Project Development at Plurial Novilia, said, “This result confirms the enormous potential of this construction method, which reduces build times and improves working conditions on site.” Workers controlled the printing robot by tablet rather than carrying out heavy lifting, reducing musculoskeletal risk on site. Dr. Fabian Meyer-Brötz, Managing Director of PERI 3D Construction, said, “We are proud to have supported this project as technology partner and print executor. The result shows vividly what is already possible in 3D building printing today, faster construction, fewer workers, and fully load-bearing structures. This is an important milestone and motivation to push this technology further.”

Project details also pointed to material and design effects beyond labour and schedule. Curved façades and a rounded floor plan were included because those shapes could be produced without the cost premium associated with conventional formwork. The optimized geometry reduced concrete volume by about 10%. On-site concrete production also reduced transport emissions. ViliaSprint² includes perlite insulation, timber balcony structures, 500 m² of photovoltaic panels, and a hybrid gas and heat pump system from Atlantic Systèmes. Project partners said the building achieves about 60% energy self-sufficiency while meetingFrance’s RE2020 2025targets.

Plurial Novilia and its partners now plan a follow-on development of about 40 apartments using two 3D printers simultaneously. The target is to reduce print time by a factor of four and bring costs in line with conventional construction through greater scale and process maturity.

Code-compliant 3D printed housing begins to move beyond single-use demonstrations

Japan recently provided one of the clearest tests of whether3D printed housing can satisfy strict structural constraintsrather than simply demonstrate geometric freedom. Construction technology companyKizukicompleted a 50 m² two-story reinforced concrete home that received government approval under Japan’s earthquake-resistance rules, among the most demanding in the world. Built with a combination of on-site and off-site printing using COBOD technology, the project showed that 3D printed residential construction can meet seismic compliance requirements while reducing reliance on labor-intensive conventional methods. That result matters here because it established that structural approval, not printing itself, remains one of the central barriers to wider residential adoption.

Italy has shown a related constraintfrom the certification side.WASP 3DBuild completed the printed walls of Itaca, a 164.9 m² home designed to comply with Italian and European construction rules, including earthquake-resistance standards. Using a four-arm Crane WASP system, the structure was produced with a lime-based material rather than concrete, while insulation, mechanical systems, and passive energy features were integrated into the broader design. That project demonstrated that permanent 3D printed housing can be aligned with existing regulatory frameworks, but it also underscored the limits that still shape the sector: certification remains difficult, and most approved examples remain individual homes rather than larger multi-family developments. Against that backdrop, the Bezannes project extends the discussion from code-compliant single-home construction to multi-family housing built under direct comparison with conventional methods.

Source: 3D Printing Industry