How to 3D-print a school in a war zone

The NGO behind a new school building in Lviv, Ukraine, believes 3D printing could help reconstruct some of the thousands of buildings destroyed by Russian bombardment.

With its soft gray lines and sleek, curving exterior, Project Hive looks less like a school and more like a wellness retreat or modern art museum.

The structure’s distinctive appearance, with a texture resembling a cocoon or the structure’s namesake beehive, is down to the construction method used to build it: 3D printing.

Standing less than 200 feet from School No.23 in Lviv, Ukraine, the walls of the 3,983-square-foot educational facility were printed in just 40 hours with a COBOD gantry printer, which follows digital blueprints to lay concrete like piping icing onto a cake.

It’s the first 3D-printed education center in Europe and the first building to be 3D-printed in a war zone, according to Jean-Christophe Bonis, founder of Team4UA, the non-profit responsible for the pilot project.

“I’m not a builder; I don’t want to be an architect or a developer… But through robotics and AI, through technology, we can accelerate the (building) process,” Bonis told CNN in a video interview.

Soon after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, places like Lviv faced a huge problem: how to cope with tens of thousands of people fleeing to — and through — the city. In the Lviv region alone, there were 173,000 internally displaced people as of December last year, according to the latest figures from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration.

Project Hive will provide the school with four extra classrooms to help it accommodate additional students displaced by the war, said Bonis. He hopes that, if successful, the project will enable “3D printing to be one of the tools of local construction in Ukraine.”