About

Cityform is a small independent studio in Sheffield, United Kingdom, run by one person. It makes 3D-printed relief models of real British cities — a true square kilometre of ground, measured from the air and printed one layer at a time.

What we make

Every Cityform plate is real geometry, not a stylised map. Each one is a nine-centimetre crop of the actual built environment — terraces, viaducts, embankments, the way roofs step down a hill. The heights come from public LIDAR; the building footprints from OpenStreetMap. The studio work is choosing the crop, getting the mesh to sit cleanly on its base, and finishing each plate by hand.

Each model shows a 9 × 9 cm crop of mapped ground on a 105 × 105 mm base, 17 mm deep, at a scale of 1:11000 — one centimetre on the plate is 110 metres on the ground.

How it is made

Four stages: survey, footprints, mesh, print. A scan of the ground from public survey data, building outlines from OpenStreetMap, both fused into a single watertight mesh with water cut down so it reads as river rather than pavement. Each plate is then printed in white PLA on a Bambu Lab printer at a 0.16 mm layer height — about fourteen hours of printing — hand-finished, and seated on a graphite base. A stainless-steel label is laser-engraved with the city name and its exact coordinates.

Every plate is made to order in the United Kingdom. A fuller walk-through is on the how it is made page.

The data behind every map

Two open datasets do the heavy lifting, and attribution travels with every order — on a printed slip in the box, on the listing page, and in the footer of this site.

LIDAR. Public digital terrain and surface models from the Environment Agency in England, the Scottish Remote Sensing Portal in Scotland, and Natural Resources Wales in Wales. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

OpenStreetMap. Community-mapped polygons for buildings, roads and water. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under ODbL.

Contact

The studio is based at Park Hill, Sheffield, S2 5JZ, United Kingdom. The fastest way to reach us is by email at hello@cityform.co.uk — we usually reply within a few hours. You can also use the message pill in the bottom corner of any page, or the contact page.