THE URBAN ARCHITECT
ARCHITECTURE IN THREE DIMENSIONS
WHO
Built from two disciplines
The Urban Architect is a design studio based in the Netherlands, founded by students of industrial engineering and architecture.
We are a small team that builds things we couldn't find anywhere else. What started as a shared obsession between two disciplines turned into something worth making properly.
Every edition is designed and made in our studio in the Netherlands.
WHY
Most framed city models aren't really cities.
You've probably seen them. Skyline outlines or street maps pulled from OpenStreetMap, scaled down until every building is the same size, glued onto a board, and called a city. From across the room it works. Up close it falls apart. You can barely tell a cathedral from an office block, and the composition is locked in forever.
That's not a city. A city is texture, contrast, the specific weight of one building next to another. You can't compress that into a single uniform scale and expect it to survive.
If you're going to put a city on your shelf, it should still feel like one.
The same building, modeled two ways.
How others build it
A standard framed city model. Buildings are scaled to a single uniform size, generated from public map data, and fixed in place. From a distance the outline is recognizable. Up close, the architecture disappears.
Our approach
Each building is modeled individually, with its own proportions and detail. Tiles sit on a magnetic grid, so nothing is locked in place. Up close,the buildings stay buildings.
WHAT
A city, finally at the right scale.
Reliëf is built tile by tile. Every landmark gets the space it needs, a canal house on 3 tiles, a church across two by three, a square spread across three by three, a bridge stretched across two by four. Each one based on architectural research and printed at the scale that lets its detail actually show.
The tiles sit on a magnetic grid inside the frame. Pick one up, swap it, recompose. New tiles and expansion sets can be added over time.Two finishes Mono & Verde. Modeled by hand, printed in matte filament, finished in a solid wooden frame. Made one at a time, in our workshop in The Netherlands.
FIND YOUR CITY.
Rearrange at will
Magnetic tiles let you reshape your city anytime.
Designed and manufactured in the Netherlands
Each building hand-modeled in our studio.
Architectural detail
The icons that make the city itself.
The right shade of white
Calibrated for architectural detail.