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Designers Use Aerial Scans to Turn Any Street in Chicago into Detailed 3D Models

By Jessica Stewart on January 20, 2018

A master of transforming architecture into sculpture, Microscape, is back with another highly detailed site model of a beloved American city. After the enormous success of their New York City scale model, they are back with another 1:5000 scale replica of Chicago.

Microscape's 3D printed cities are fully customizable, coming in square sections that allow you to select the areas of the city you love the most or fit together several areas like pieces of a puzzle. For the Windy City, the firm has created the replica from 9 square miles of the downtown area, broken into 36, 6-inch by 6-inch squares. So whether you want a model of Willis Tower on your desk as an architectural sculpture or the full downtown map as a piece of wall art, Microscape can make it happen.

And since you can have as little—or as much—of the Chicago replica as you'd like, you can enjoy the beauty of an architectural scale model without having to sacrifice space in your home or office. A searchable map on their website allows you to see the different areas of the site model that are available, even letting you type in a monument or street address to quickly access the quadrant that suits your needs. Microscape guarantees the accuracy of its 3D printing, as it manually processes aerial scan data, meaning that it can also evolve over time as new buildings pop up.

Looking for your own piece of Chicago? At the time of writing, Microscape was making the first pieces available to Kickstarter supporters and with over 200 backers, it's sure to be as successful as their previous model.