Among the charming centuries-old cottages, an elaborate white tower in Switzerland stands out like a sore thumb.

Constructed by robots, it’s the world’s tallest 3D-printed building, measuring almost 100 feet (30 metres) in height.

To put that into perspective, that’s more than six times the size of a double-decker bus! 

Known as Tor Alva (the ‘White Tower’), the gleaming white construction in the small village of Mulegns offers a new tourist attraction and cultural hub. 

Tor Alva is intended to emulate a layered cake – a tribute to the history of confectioners in the region – and also takes inspiration from filigree, an intricate metalwork technique used in making jewellery. 

Giovanni Netzer, founder of the Origen Cultural Foundation, which designed and built the tower with ETH Zurich, called it ‘a technical triumph’. 

‘It inspires the building sector, encourages sustainable tourism and offers new cultural space,’ Mr Netzer said. 

It’s now open to the public – so, would you be brave enough to scale it?

The White Tower, officially unveiled on May 20, is now open daily for guided tours and will host staged performances from July. 

At the very top is a cupola theatre, a performance space described as a breathtaking venue with spectacular views of the surrounding mountain landscape. 

According to ETH Zurich, the 32-capacity tower is designed to serve as a cultural hub and a way to breathe fresh life into a village threatened by depopulation. 

Mulegns is home to only around a dozen people – down from about 140 in 1900, 50 in 1980 and 30 in 2000. 

Unfortunately, the rapidly plummeting numbers mean it is at risk of being depopulated entirely, turning it into an abandoned ghost town. 

‘Tor Alva breathes new life into a historic community while setting a global standard for sustainable, culturally vibrant development,’ the project’s website says.  

According to experts, the tower representing a ‘symbiosis’ of ‘architecture, culture, and science’ is made up of 32 unique 3D-printed columns. 

Each column is ‘articulated with a bold array of forms and intricate ornamentation at multiple scales, giving the structure an enigmatic, otherworldly presence’. 

A special mix of concrete was used, dispersed layer-by-layer by massive robotic arms programmed with blueprints and instructions. 

Developed by Professor Robert Flatt at ETH Zurich’s Institute for Building Materials, the mix had to be soft enough to bond in the elaborate shapes, while hardening quickly enough to support the subsequent layers. 

It took five months to print the columns on the ETH Hönggerberg campus in the outskirts of Zurich, about 80 miles away. 

Components were then assembled in Savognin and delivered to Mulegns via the Julier road in a heavy goods vehicle before being assembled on top of a building formerly used as a blacksmith’s shop. 

‘With its striking architecture and groundbreaking use of technology, the White Tower exemplifies the transformative potential of computational design and digital fabrication in architecture and construction,’ the experts add. 

‘The use of 3D printing enables a bold, non-standard approach to architecture, offering an extraordinary range of shapes and forms.’ 

It’s unclear how much has been spent on the project, although similar large-scale printing projects exceed 1 million Francs (£880,000), Concrete Connect reports.

MailOnline has contacted ETH Zurich for more information.  

Mulegns is not the permanent home of the Tor Alva, however; in 2030, after five years, the tower will be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere to give another settlement a boost

By that time, it’s hoped Mulegns’ population will have recovered thanks to media exposure from Tor Alva and the associated tourism. 

The alpine village flourished in the 19th century as returning emigrant confectioners built grand villas and hotel pioneers fostered a thriving tourism industry. 

3D printing is increasingly becoming a building method of choice to reduce human labour and speed up the construction process.

One US firm called Mighty Buildings is offering customisable 3D printed abodes starting from $100,000 (£75,000) that fit in a back garden.

3D PRINTING TECHNOLOGY MAKES OBJECTS BY DEPOSITING MATERIALS ONE LAYER AT A TIME

First invented in the 1980s by Chuck Hull, an engineer and physicist, 3D printing technology – also called additive manufacturing – is the process of making an object by depositing material, one layer at a time.

Similarly to how an inkjet printer adds individual dots of ink to form an image, a 3D printer adds material where it is needed, based on a digital file.

Many conventional manufacturing processes involved cutting away excess materials to make a part, and this can lead to wastage of up to 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms) for every one pound of useful material, according to the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

By contrast, with some 3D printing processes about 98 per cent of the raw material is used in the finished part, and the method can be used to make small components using plastics and metal powders, with some experimenting with chocolate and other food, as well as biomaterials similar to human cells.

3D printers have been used to manufacture everything from prosthetic limbs to robots, and the process follows these basic steps:

· Creating a 3D blueprint using computer-aided design (CAD) software

· Preparing the printer, including refilling the raw materials such as plastics, metal powders and binding solutions.

· Initiating the printing process via the machine, which builds the object.

· 3D printing processes can vary, but material extrusion is the most common, and it works like a glue gun: the printing material is heated until it liquefies and is extruded through the print nozzle

· Using information from the digital file, the design is split into two-dimensional cross-sections so the printers knows where to put the material

· The nozzle deposits the polymer in thin layers, often 0.1 millimetre (0.004 inches) thick.

· The polymer rapidly solidifies, bonding to the layer below before the build platform lowers and the print head adds another layer (depending on the object, the entire process can take anywhere from minutes to days.)

· After the printing is finished, every object requires some post-processing, ranging from unsticking the object from the build platform to removing support, to removing excess powders.