MiniCityArt just released 3D printable tiles for the entire City of Boston on Thingiverse. Every building, hill, and bridge in Boston appears in these pieces. Head there now and download and print any tiles you want. Original data came from the Boston Planning & Development Agency, but was made 3D printable using code developed here at MiniCityArt HQ in Fort Point.

The city is broken up into 210 square tiles, each 1km square. The geometry is in mm, so if you print them as-is, you will get a 100x100mm (4"x4") tile at 1:10000 scale. At this scale, all of Boston would be 6 feet high and 7.5 feet wide. If you print it 200% size, the model will be 1:5000 scale and each tile will measure 200x200mm (8"x8"). If you printed every tile, the resulting map would be 12.5 feet high and 15 feet wide!

We’re busy printing every tile at 1:10000 scale to create the first 3D printed map of the entire City of Boston. Photos of our progress appear below. If your school or gallery or civic building would like to show the finished piece, please contact us!

Note that these tiles are not quite like MiniCityArt’s regular products. The data used to generate these tiles contains only buildings, bridges, and land, while MiniCity models use much larger and more detailed datasets containing every tree, car, bus, light post, and detail in a city, including all the air handling units on the tops of buildings, all of the highways, bridges, and infrastructure, boats in marinas, etc.

This project would not have happened without the freely-available data from the Boston Planning & Development Agency (provided without warranty) and support from Artists For Humanity. The work to prepare and post these tiles was done by our new data intern Suleiman Hussein.

Mark S.
Founder, MiniCityArt