Generated from the same geometry the printer is handed — the plate seen from directly above. It cannot show the relief, which is the part you have to hold.
Switzerland
Twenty-three cantons over the Alps
Switzerland is the country this workshop knows best and the hardest one to cut well: Genève is a fingernail, Graubünden is a third of the plate, and the half-cantons had to be merged to keep every piece pickable. The relief is what makes it: Valais and Graubünden are visibly mountain, the plateau between Zürich and Genève is visibly not, and the reason nearly everyone lives on that plateau needs no explaining once the plate is in front of you.
What a child works out
- Where the Alps are and where the people are — and how those two facts relate.
- Cantons are wildly different sizes, and that is the point of the system.
- The big lakes sit on the seam between mountain and plateau.
The plate
- Pieces
- 23 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 1.5 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1.29
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 95 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Aargau
- Appenzell
- Basel
- Bern
- Fribourg
- Genève
- Glarus
- Graubünden
- Jura
- Luzern
- Neuchâtel
- Schaffhausen
- Schwyz
- Solothurn
- St Gallen
- Thurgau
- Ticino
- Unterwalden
- Uri
- Valais
- Vaud
- Zug
- Zürich
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.
Follow the borders — World to continent to country to canton to city district
More from Countries & States
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Europe
Forty-five countries at real elevation
The political map, printed on the terrain it was drawn over. Forty-five pieces, from Andorra to Russia's western edge.
- Pieces
- 45 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 24.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
The United States
The lower forty-eight, and two pieces you would not expect
Fifty pieces. The straight western borders and the crooked eastern ones, over the ground that explains both.
- Pieces
- 50 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 20.1 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00
North America
Nineteen countries, Panama to the Arctic
The continent as countries — including the Caribbean islands that are usually too small to cut.
- Pieces
- 19 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.3 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 6 and up
- Price
- CHF 120.00