Most of our bespoke work is one building. This was a whole district.
A UK interior design firm asked us to make a large 3D map of Midtown Manhattan for a project they were working on in New York — a piece to hang on a wall in an apartment. Not a model of a single landmark, but the city itself: the grid, the towers, the rivers, and Central Park, in a single piece.
Midtown Manhattan 3D map in the workshop
A cityscape of Midtown Manhattan, built to a tight timetable and ready to ship to New York. Big enough to read from across the room, detailed enough to reward a close look.
The finished map measures 184 × 155 cm at a scale of 1:3000. That covers around 25 km² of New York: the Hudson piers on one side, the East River and the first streets of Queens on the other, with Central Park sitting at the top.
The land and every building are 3D printed in white tiles. The water and the park are cut from acrylic — blue for the rivers, green for the park, with the lakes cut through to show blue beneath. The whole thing sits on a wooden base inside an oak frame.
Midtown Manhattan 3D map
At 1:3000 the supertalls on Billionaires’ Row become the tallest things on the map. Central Park Tower, 472 m in real life, is 15.7 cm here. 111 West 57th Street is 14.5 cm. 432 Park Avenue is 14.2 cm. Everything else — the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, the brownstones of the Upper East Side — is modelled at the same scale, so the heights are true to each other.
Close up of some of the buildings
We built a wooden crate for it. From there the design firm took over: a white glove courier collected the crate from us, transported it to Manhattan, and installed the map on the wall of their client’s apartment.
It is now hanging in the centre of the streets it shows.
Finished 3D map ready to ship.
