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Construction 3D printing firm COBOD and cement company Cementos Argos have 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, with Comfama, the municipality of La Unión, and contractor Fundación Berta Martínez all 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.
That economic argument matters most in the places where the technology is hardest to deploy. Colombia’s housing deficit is concentrated in rural and peri-urban areas where conventional construction is slow, expensive, and reliant on supply chains that do not extend reliably into difficult terrain. The La Unión project does not resolve that deficit, but it establishes a replicable model with documented performance data, which is the prerequisite for any serious attempt to address it at scale.
Replicable Models for Infrastructure Deficits
The constraint the La Unión project is responding to has appeared in other forms elsewhere.
In 2021, LafargeHolcim and CDC Group’s joint venture 14Trees used a COBOD BOD2 printer to build the world’s first 3D printed school in Malawi in 18 hours. This was driven by a classroom deficit that UNICEF estimated at 36,000 in that country alone, a gap that would take years to close using conventional construction at conventional pace.
Here, the parallel with La Unión is direct, meaning both projects were responses to documented infrastructure deficits that conventional methods had not resolved, and both used the same BOD2 3D printer to do it.
The viability of this technology under strict regulatory standards is demonstrated by a separate data point. In January 2025, Harcourt Technologies completed Europe’s first ISO/ASTM 52939:2023 compliant 3D printed social housing project in Grange Close, Ireland, using the same BOD2 printer, finishing 35% faster than conventional methods.
That project established what compliance with recognized construction standards looks like in a regulated Western context. The La Unión project follows local seismic and climatic building codes, but the Grange Close result is relevant because it confirms that certified social housing delivery is achievable with this equipment, demonstrating the technology is capable of meeting international standards.
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Featured image shows exterior view of a 63 m² (678 sq. ft.) single-story 3D printed concrete house in rural Colombia. Photo via Cementos Argos | COBOD.
