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Looking up into a cupola of ruffled, translucent plastic layers in pink, blue and purple, printed as hollow tubular beads
Photo: Stefan Kaiser

Gelateria Mulegns

Mulegns, Switzerland · 2025 · MAS ETH DFAB and Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich

An ice cream shop next to Tor Alva, under a cupola robotically printed from recycled plastic: 250 square metres that weigh less than a tonne.

The Gelateria stands next to Tor Alva in Mulegns, part of Nova Fundaziun Origen's plan to bring the village back to life. Outside it takes the silhouette of the barn that once stood there, a faceted shell of reclaimed timber wrapped in a translucent membrane. Inside, a colourful printed cupola recalls the Baroque and the Grisons confectioners who shaped Italian ice cream culture. The whole building can be taken apart: the timber can be reused, and the plastic shredded and printed again.

How COMPAS was used

Students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication printed the cupola with ABB robots in the Robotic Fabrication Laboratory, ETH Zurich, using Hollow-Core, an extrusion process from the Chair of Digital Building Technologies that prints large hollow tubular beads. They lowered the geometric resolution to print faster and used the colour of recycled PETG as a design parameter. The robotic printing ran on COMPAS RRC, which streamed the print paths to the ABB robots.

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