Tor Alva, or “The White Tower”, has been unveiled in Mulegns and was created by the Origen Cultural Foundation in collaboration with ETH Zurich.

Designed as an immersive performance space, the White Tower features a cupola theatre enveloped by a forest of filigree branching columns, creating a venue above the village rooftops.

The tower has four levels, each consisting of eight reinforced 3D-printed concrete columns. It has a double dome consisting of 32 branching columns, which are  fully structural, using 3D-printed concrete as a load-bearing material.

The mid-sections of the column shafts were 3D-printed at ETH Zurich’s Robotic Fabrication laboratory at the Institute of Technology in Architecture over a period of four months.

The separate capital and base of each column were fabricated using an innovative approach of combining traditional casting of concrete with 3D printed plastic formwork developed at ETH Zurich. This strategy allows for achieving a high precision of the interfaces, and permits an efficient production of those repetitive parts.

Maximising prefabrication for a building in the Alps is ideal due to the region’s harsh weather, remote locations, and short construction windows, which complicate on-site work.

By manufacturing components in controlled factory settings, prefabrication ensures quality, reduces environmental impact, and simplifies logistics, while minimising labour needs and costs in rugged terrain. This approach enables faster assembly, enhances sustainability, and ensures structural reliability against snow loads and seismic activity, all within predictable budgets.

These column segments were transported to Savognin, 10km from Mulegns, where they were joined together into full columns. From there, the completed columns were delivered to the final destination, where they are assembled level by level and screwed together. Each level could be assembled within a single day.

As the tower was designed with dry connections, the disassembly will be equally straightforward as the assembly, without the risk or need of destroying the elements. Using mechanical fasteners like bolts instead of permanent adhesives or wet concrete, these connections allow building components to be dismantled, relocated, and reused elsewhere.

Designing for reuse with dry connections enhances sustainability and adaptability by enabling structures to be easily disassembled and reconfigured without material loss. This significantly reduces waste and resource consumption, and aligns with the project’s environmental principles.