Agriculture Minister Özdemir visits the GROPYUS smart factory in Richen, Baden-Württemberg: A glimpse into the future of sustainable serial construction

• The German Federal Minister of Agriculture Cem Özdemir visits GROPYUS’s highly automated Smart Factory for the prefabrication of building elements — a world first — in Richen, Baden-Württemberg.  

• Technology-based construction company GROPYUS is driving the transformation of the construction industry with its fully digitalized, affordable, and sustainable building concepts. 

• From 2025, production will commence in the smart factory – with significant production capacity based on its 250,000 m² gross floor area and with room to upscale by up to 20 percent.  

Richen, September 21, 2024 – Cem Özdemir, the German Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, visited GROPYUS‘s ultra-modern smart factory in Richen, Baden-Württemberg today. The production facility is one of a kind, worldwide, and GROPYUS is in the process of greatly expanding its current capacity. This highly automated production facility includes 50 robots across two production lines. These robots manufacture wall and ceiling elements using digitally controlled processes and 120 special robotic tools, developed in house. The smart factory represents a significant step towards the sustainable transformation of the construction industry in Germany — paving the way to make cost-efficient, environmentally friendly, and fully digitally controlled construction processes a reality in the long term. 

“We are facing huge challenges in relation to construction. We urgently need affordable housing, but at the same time, construction must become more environmentally friendly and sustainable. Wood as a building material opens up completely new possibilities. Wood stores carbon and can be processed efficiently and in an environmentally friendly way using scalable and modular methods. This is part of the reason why we are aiming to increase the proportion of timber construction in this country — through the federal Timber Construction Initiative. The Timber Construction Initiative also sends a strong signal about the necessity to transform and decarbonize the economy,” Cem Özdemir said during his visit. 

In future, GROPYUS will be able to develop and produce multistory, sustainable timber-hybrid apartment buildings on an industrial scale at the dedicated smart factory in Richen. The planning process will be entirely digital, followed by a highly automated manufacturing process and partially automated on-site assembly. The company focuses on end-to-end digitalization, which optimizes and accelerates the entire construction process — from planning, production, and construction all the way through to ongoing building operations. The robots in the smart factory achieve an automation level of up to 86 percent. This allows GROPYUS to reduce construction times by around 50 percent compared to conventional construction methods. 

Markus Fuhrmann, CEO of GROPYUS, emphasizes the importance of these technological innovations: “Our smart factory is setting new standards in serial timber construction. We developed our production system through product-based simultaneous engineering, which allows us to move seamlessly from planning to custom manufacturing in a continuous process. This system allows us to do more than just build faster and more efficiently; it also paves the way to environmentally friendly living for everyone.  With our technology, we strive to make a significant contribution to solving the housing and climate crisis.” 

In the new smart factory, it takes just 16 minutes each to construct a wall or ceiling element. This efficiency, coupled with the use of sustainable materials and digital processes, enables GROPYUS to build more than 3,500 apartments per year. This is equivalent to a gross floor area of 250,000 m². By centralizing all systems control, process definition and optimization, and mechanical engineering processes, GROPYUS expects to raise its production capacity by 20 percent to hit 300,000 m² gross floor area per year.