Awesome Stuff: Celebrating Cities

from the highways-and-byways dept

This week, we're looking at a pair of crowdfunded projects for proud urbanites: artwork that celebrates our streets and cityscapes.

Microscape Models

There's no shortage of souvenirs in the name of New York City, but this project offers an incredible new way to celebrate Manhattan: 1:5000 scale 3D-printed replicas of the cityscape itself, made with unbelievable levels of accuracy from recent aerial scans. Eventually they plan to do a huge array of cities, but for now it's the big one, rendered in all its gridlocked glory. The designs are hand-tweaked to optionally include buildings under construction or still in planning. The models come as individual 6" squares which can (for a hefty total price tag of $25k) even be assembled into a complete replica city — but, just one or two are pretty damn impressive all by themselves. There are also special landmark tiles available to Kickstarter backers, focusing on spots like the Chrysler Building, One World Trade Center, and Washington Square Park.

Every Road Custom Maps

Late last year, you might have seen a map making the rounds that purported to show how every road does indeed lead to Rome. Of course, as most people noticed (including the creators), you could create the same kind of visual for any spot on the road network of any location — and that's exactly what Every Road offers. They are custom map posters generated with an address of your choice in any given city, showing all the thousands of street routes from every point of the city to your chosen spot. The results are wispy, fractal-esque versions of recognizable city maps, and no two will be identical (unless two people choose the same address). The pricing is a little odd, with high-res digital copies costing slightly more than the smallest available print size — but for those who want to save cash, there's also a $5 desktop wallpaper option.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: awesome stuff, cities, maps


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Anonymouse, 1 Feb 2016 @ 10:22am

    25k really? There's software to convert images into 3D models and then just print them on a 3D printer. Could probably do this for 1/100th the price on your own.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.