Construction group Matthäi Schlüsselfertigbau has established an in-house construction 3D printing division following the completion of its own headquarters in Selsingen, Lower Saxony, a two-storey, 364 m² (3,920 ft²) office whose walls were printed in roughly 105 hours on a COBOD BOD2 and which the company occupied in July 2026.
The subsidiary belongs to Matthäi, one of Germany’s twenty largest construction groups, with more than 3,300 employees and revenue of around EUR 1 billion. The new division was set up in partnership with PERI 3D Construction, which acted as technology partner and supervised the printing phase.
“Matthäi printed a two-story office building and then set up its own printing division. That step, from one project to an in-house capability, is exactly what we want to see. It shows construction 3D printing has moved from demonstration into everyday business,” said Philip Lund-Nielsen, Co-founder and CCO of COBOD International.
What was printed, and what was not
The building stands about 7.4 m (24 ft) high, 22.5 m (74 ft) long and 13.5 m (44 ft) deep, printed across two full storeys. It offers 364 m² of usable space, split between 170 m² (1,830 ft²) on the ground floor and 194 m² (2,090 ft²) above. The walls of both floors together accounted for the approximately 105 hours of print time, using Holcim’s TectorPrint, a printable cementitious material.
The rest of the structure came from the conventional playbook: foundation, base slab, floors and roof were all built by traditional methods. That division of labour is the practical shape of construction 3D printing today, and it is also what makes the project a credible template rather than a showpiece, the printer handled the vertical envelope while the remaining trades worked as they always have.
For Matthäi, the result carries a regional first. “The entire Matthäi Group is proud to be able to realize the first 3D printed building in Northern Germany,” said Bernd Mergard, Managing Director of Matthäi Schlüsselfertigbau. “Together with our partners at PERI 3D Construction, we are taking an important step into the future of construction.”
Geometry straight from the model
The form and facade were designed by the architectural office Schulenburg together with the planning firm Mense-Korte, with the company name carried across the printed exterior and curved concrete walls framing the interior corridors and seating areas. Those geometries came directly out of the digital model.
In conventional construction, comparable shapes require bespoke formwork, and the cost of that formwork is usually what kills them at the design stage; printing removes the intermediate step entirely, which is why curvature tends to be the first thing architects reach for on these projects.
Schulenburg frames the technology as a structural change to the industry rather than a tool upgrade. “3D concrete printing allows us to completely revolutionize traditional construction processes,” said Tim Schulenburg, Managing Director of Schulenburg Architekten. “As a company, we see in this innovation not only a technological advance, but the creation of an entirely new sector within construction. With this technology we are shaping the future of building: faster, more flexible and more sustainable.”
Owning the capability instead of buying the service
The strategic move is ownership, not the building. Matthäi could have kept hiring printing in project by project; instead it used a job where it was its own client to justify a permanent division, with PERI 3D Construction retained as technology partner rather than as the contractor doing the work.
That shift is visible elsewhere. In April 2026, Alquist moved from pilots to production with its A1 robotic arm platform through a fourteen-unit deal in which general contractor FMGI takes ownership of the printers, financed and maintained by equipment dealer Hugg & Hall. The hardware sits with the builder, not the technology provider.
The same pattern holds at the top end of the scale. In Qatar, contractor UCC Holding operates two COBOD BODXL printers on the Ashghal school project rather than subcontracting the printing to the machine’s maker. In each case a construction company, not a printing specialist, ends up running the equipment. Matthäi has bought itself a printed, occupied, two-storey reference and a division to sell it from.
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Featured image shows The exterior of Matthäi Schlüsselfertigbau’s new headquarters in Selsingen, Germany, printed with a COBOD BOD2, with two people at the entrance. Photo via COBOD.
