Residents Receive Keys to First 3D Printed Social Housing in South America

Home-Residents Receive Keys to First 3D Printed Social Housing in South America

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Construction 3D printing firmCOBODand cement companyCementos Argoshave completed two 3D printed social housing units in La Unión, Antioquia, Colombia, handing over the keys to resident families in what the firms describe as the first 3D printed social housing in South America.

The work was carried out under Casa Para Mí, a social housing initiative run by Cementos Argos through its innovation unit,Future Tech, withComfama, the municipality of La Unión, and contractorFundación Berta Martínezall involved in delivery. COBOD supplied the BOD2 3D printer that handled all structural wall printing on site.

Each of the two houses spans 63 m², with two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, bathroom, laundry area, and porch. 3D printing the walls took 16 hours spread across three days, bringing them to a finished height of 2.2 m. Compared to conventional construction, Cementos Argos reports the approach cut build time by 30%, reduced material consumption by 20%, and brought waste generation down by up to 30%.

Engineering Efficiency in Challenging Terrain

Reaching those numbers required a mortar mix capable of performing under the region’s seismic and climatic conditions, which Cementos Argos developed from scratch for the project.

The mix achieved a compressive strength above 35 MPa and a flexural strength of 8 MPa. Calcined clay was incorporated as a partial substitute for standard cement constituents, lowering the material’s carbon footprint without sacrificing structural performance. Because COBOD’s open-material strategy places no restrictions on which mixes the 3D printer can use, none of this required hardware modifications.

Delivering the printer to the site was its own challenge. The BOD2 had to be broken down and loaded across five small trucks to get through the mountainous terrain of Antioquia, then reassembled once on the ground. From there, the team 3D printed through humid tropical conditions and recurring heavy rainfall without any reported breaks in the schedule.

Cementos Argos has said it is already looking at further rural housing projects using the same method, with cost reduction at scale as the stated objective. The per-unit economics of construction 3D printing shift considerably as projects grow larger and the fixed costs of setup and logistics are spread across more units.

Source: 3D Printing Industry