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Zürich City relief puzzle, seen at an angle
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12 piecesZürich, Switzerland

Zürich City

The twelve Kreise

▶ Play it online

At 81 metres to the millimetre this is a street-scale relief: the Uetliberg rises on one side, the Zürichberg on the other, and the Limmat runs between them through the numbered Kreise. For anyone who lives in the city it is a strange and immediate object, because the hills you cycle up every day are suddenly something you can hold at once. The same twelve districts, in black and white and framed rather than cut, are what redmark.art sells as art.

What a child works out

  • Cities have topography, and it decides where the expensive streets are.
  • The numbered districts are not arbitrary — follow the river and the hills.
  • The scale of a map changes what it can tell you.
CHF 15.00

A download, to print yourself

  • A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
  • One STL per piece, for any other slicer
  • A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
  • For your own use; the licence is in the download

What you need to print it

  • A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
  • A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed

Printed it? Got an idea?

Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on Zürich City.

The plate

Pieces
12 pieces
Plate
250 × 176 mm

B5 — the size of a school exercise book.

Scale
1 mm ≈ 81 m

How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.

Vertical exaggeration
× 1

Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.

Thickness
8.8 mm
Smallest piece
261 mm²

Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.

Fit
0.35 mm clearance

Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.

Material
PLA, printed in Switzerland

Every named piece

  • 1
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9

Zoom in, zoom out

A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.

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