A 3D printer is building on ASU's Polytechnic campus

ASU Is About to Print Its First Building, and It's Pretty Wild

Arizona State University has always had a thing for doing things first, and 2026 is no exception. The university is moving forward with plans to construct the Valley's first 3D-printed building on its Polytechnic campus in Mesa, and the concept is every bit as futuristic as it sounds.

The structure will be a 1,200-square-foot shade and market building situated next to the new ISTB 12 facility, which just opened last fall as a hub for robotics, advanced manufacturing, and engineering. It will serve students and staff waiting at the campus shuttle stop while housing a small market operated in partnership with Aramark, ASU's dining services provider.

Here is the part that makes your brain do a double-take: instead of conventional framing and concrete pours, a massive industrial printer will essentially draw the walls into existence by layering coils of concrete in patterns generated by a computer. The site gets gridded out, and the machine goes to work, stacking material in precisely calculated sequences until walls emerge from the ground. Think of it as a giant version of the desktop 3D printers you might find in a school makerspace, but instead of plastic filament, it extrudes concrete.

For Valley residents who have watched ASU's Polytechnic campus grow into a serious East Valley innovation hub, this project is another signal that Mesa is becoming a proving ground for technologies shaping the future of construction. With housing costs and labor shortages continuing to strain the region, the timing of a real-world demonstration like this feels meaningful beyond the campus gates.

No firm completion date has been announced yet, but the project is part of ASU's ambitious 2026 construction pipeline that also includes a new health sciences tower in downtown Phoenix and the McCain Library in Tempe.

Sources: ASU News | AZ Big Media | Construction Owners | McCarthy Building