In the winter of 2016–17, the construction-tech company Apis Cor printed the walls of a small house in Stupino, outside Moscow, in about 24 hours of machine time, using a mobile printer that worked on the building site itself. The finished home measured 38 square metres (about 400 square feet), and the company put the total cost at $10,134, or roughly $275 per square metre. It was a demonstration rather than a home for sale, but it became one of the best-known early examples of 3D-printed construction.
The headline numbers are real, with important limits: "24 hours" was printing time, not the whole build, and the price covered one small prototype. Here is what Apis Cor actually did, how its printer differs from others, and what happened next.
How the Apis Cor printer works
Most early construction printers were gantry machines: a large frame that surrounds the building and moves a nozzle along fixed rails. They work, but the frame has to be bigger than whatever it prints, which makes it heavy and slow to move. Some companies avoided the problem by printing wall sections in a factory and trucking them to the site.
Apis Cor's founder, Nikita Chen-Yun-Tai, took a different route. His printer is built more like a compact tower crane: a central mast with a rotating arm that extrudes concrete in layers around itself. It can be set up inside the footprint of the house, print the walls in place, and then be lifted out by crane. Chen-Yun-Tai has said his passion is "to automate everything," and the company describes its aim as making construction faster and cheaper by handing heavy, repetitive work to machines.
For comparison, a Chinese firm drew attention in 2015 with a five-storey apartment block assembled from parts printed off-site. Apis Cor's pitch was that printing on-site removes the need to transport large printed sections at all.
The Stupino house, step by step
The house was printed at Apis Cor's base in Stupino during the coldest part of the year. The printer itself can run in temperatures down to −35°C, but the concrete mix needs warmer conditions to cure properly, so the team put a tent over the machine and the structure.
The printer laid down the self-supporting walls, internal partitions and building envelope. In the company's words, "pure machine time of printing amounted to 24 hours." Horizontal fibreglass reinforcement was built into the walls, which came out smooth enough to paint straight away. The printer was then lifted out, a flat roof designed to carry heavy snow was added, and the interior was insulated and fitted out.
The finished home has a hallway, bathroom, living room and kitchen, with curved walls. Samsung supplied the appliances, including a curved television chosen to match the wall. The building stayed on Apis Cor's own site as a showcase.
What the $10,134 covered, and what it did not
According to the company, the figure included the printed walls plus windows, doors, internal and external finishing, the roof, floors and electrical wiring. That is impressive for a finished room-sized home, but a few things are worth keeping in mind before comparing it with a house you might buy:
- Land, permits and connections to water, sewage and power are not part of a demonstration budget like this, yet they often make up a large share of real housing costs.
- Labour and site preparation before and after printing take far longer than one day. The 24 hours describes the printer's running time only.
- Lifespan claims are the company's own. Apis Cor said the house could last up to 175 years, but no independent long-term data existed for a building printed in 2016.
- Scale matters. A 38 m² single-storey house is a very different engineering problem from a family home or an apartment block.
Why 3D-printed construction draws so much interest
Printing concrete walls can cut material waste, reduce the number of workers needed for the heaviest tasks and allow curved shapes that are expensive with formwork. Some studies have found lower costs and emissions for printed houses than for conventional ones, though results depend heavily on the design and the materials used.
The limitations are just as real. Printing the shell alone does not solve reinforcement, plumbing, wiring or interior finishes, which still need conventional trades. Building codes in many countries were written before printed walls existed, so permits can be slow, and engineers are still working out standards for durability and quality control.
From Stupino to Dubai
In December 2019 Apis Cor completed what it called the world's largest 3D-printed building: a two-storey office for Dubai Municipality, 9.5 metres high with 640 square metres of floor space. A single printer was moved around the site by crane and worked outdoors, without humidity or temperature control, using a gypsum-based material sourced locally.
The project was still a hybrid. It sat on conventional foundations, the column formwork was printed and then filled with reinforced concrete, the floors used precast slabs, and windows and roofs were added conventionally. At the time, the company said it planned to build affordable housing in Florida, Louisiana and California.
Will printed houses make housing cheap?
Early coverage of the Stupino house predicted a wave of cheap homes that would upend the mortgage industry. That was too optimistic. Printing has since moved from demonstrations to real neighbourhoods, including a community of printed homes built in Texas in 2022 by ICON and Lennar, but it remains one tool among many rather than a revolution.
The fair takeaway is that 3D printing can make the walls of a house faster and, in some cases, cheaper. Whether it makes homes affordable depends on everything else: land, regulation, financing and the many trades that a printer cannot replace. The little curved-walled house in Stupino showed what the machines can do, and also how much of building a home happens after the printer stops.
Sources: photos and video of the Apis Cor demonstration project; 3D Printing Industry, 1 March 2017: Apis Cor 3D prints house in one day; Dezeen, 22 December 2019: World's largest 3D-printed building completes in Dubai; Wikipedia: Construction 3D printing.
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