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Frankfurt's skyline, brick by brick

Oct 13
5 min read

Real building heights from Overture Maps, stacked on a flat plate you can build.

A brick model seen from the south-east: a square city block in studded olive and ochre bricks with pale tan towers standing on it and a dark green band of open ground running through the middle

Frankfurt's banking district as a 32 × 32 build, about 600 m of city on each side. The green band is the Taunusanlage park; every tower stands 15 plates tall. This is Brixels' own Isometric view (PNG), every piece in the colour you would order.

Frankfurt's banking district puts several of Germany's tallest towers around one strip of park, the Taunusanlage. What survives of it when every building becomes a stack of plates on a 26 cm board?

Below are the five decisions that turned a search box into the model above, one of them a real trade-off, and what Downloads gives you to build it. Open this exact skyline and follow along.

How this one got made

The whole city fits in one brick

Open brixels.krshi27.art, type Frankfurt am Main into the search box under Location and press Fly there. The map frames the city region: the Main valley in green, the Taunus in the top-left corner. Open Ground & Buildings and turn Buildings on.

The caption under the map counts 106 buildings in view. All of them are taller than 50 m, because Min building height (m) starts at 50: I set it there so a first visit takes the smaller, quicker download. At this zoom they show up as a single pale brick.

A brick relief of the Frankfurt region in greens and browns, with one small pale brick circled in the middle of the green valley

The first render with Buildings on: the city's towers are the one pale brick in the circle. The white summit top left is the Taunus.

Zoom in six steps with the map's + until the banking district fills the view, and set Brick size under Bricks to Fine. Terrain stops at zoom 13; with Buildings on the map goes on to 18.

Every building, at a price

With Min at 50 m, 24 buildings are left in view. Set Min building height (m) to 0 and the rest of the city arrives: 2,078 buildings, and with them the street plan. The caption says 46 % of them have a measured height. The rest are drawn from their number of floors, or at a guessed 6 m when that is missing too.

Here is the trade. At 50 m the tallest stud keeps its 259 m, the Commerzbank Tower. At 0 it stands at 142 m, the same as the next few towers. I clip building heights at the 98th percentile of the view, because a city's heights are lopsided: mostly low-rise, plus a few towers. Each extra building pulls that line down.

A view at 0 may be at most 111 km across before the app refuses to fetch it; above 0 the limit is 222 km. Zoomed out further, Buildings stays locked with a caption that says how far to zoom in.

Land off, and the hill disappears

With Land on, the buildings stand on the terrain, and here that terrain is a patchwork of big flat squares in every colour of the elevation ramp. The legend explains it: 1 plate = 1 m. The banking district has about 11 m of slope, and the tallest ground in view gets ten plates, as it would on a mountain. I subtract the lowest ground in view before stacking the buildings on it, so a city 300 m above sea level doesn't spend its plates on altitude. In a hillside city that keeps the hill. In Frankfurt's flat centre it builds one out of 11 metres.

Turn Land off. The buildings stand on a flat Ground plate in dark green, the colour the elevation ramp gives sea level, and the Taunusanlage park appears as a green band through the middle. Ground plate colour, under Colour, paints the plate any colour you like.

Three versions of the same city view side by side: coloured terrain squares with a few pale towers; the same squares covered in brown buildings; brown buildings on flat dark green ground with a band of open ground running through

Left to right: the default 50 m minimum on terrain, every building on terrain, every building on a flat base. Only the third reads as a city.

The Ground and Buildings controls: Land off, Buildings on, Ground plate on, the caption Buildings on a flat base, and Min building height at 0

The ground settings for this build.

Taller towers, in a colour you can see

Buildings have their own scale: a 300 m tower gets ten plates, times Building height factor under Bricks. That keeps a 30 m block from vanishing next to a mountain. At factor 1 the towers here are six plates tall, a little above the rest. At 3 they reach 15.

Shortest buildings and Tallest buildings, under Colour, are the two ends of the buildings' own colour ramp: the shortest building in view takes the first, the tallest the second, and every other building falls between them. The default slate blues sink into the dark ground, so pick something warm: here dark brown, #714E0E, up to pale ochre, #F1CD8E.

Three renders of the build side by side: blue buildings with short towers, blue buildings with towers casting long sides, and the same tall towers in brown and pale ochre

The 32 × 32 build at Building height factor 1 and 3, then recoloured. Look at the long sides the towers throw at factor 3.

From screen to object

Brick map (PNG), under Downloads once you have ticked the terms, is the top-down picture of the build, with the building ramp in the legend: 3 m to 142 m, where the clip sits. The view at the top of this post is the same build from the side, drawn from the heights on the app's own bricks; open the 3D model (LDR) in BrickLink Studio for the real thing.

The exported brick map: brown city blocks with pale towers on dark green ground, a legend band below with a flat scale brick, a Ground plate swatch and a Buildings ramp from 3 m to 142 m

The exported Brick map (PNG). From above, height shows only as the length of each tower's side.

The same list follows as for a terrain map: the free 3D model holds every piece in place, and Order these bricks sends it to Brickwith, Gobricks' own shop, with every part priced (an affiliate link, as the caption under the button says). I use Overture's buildings rather than the GlobalBuildingAtlas: the atlas is licensed non-commercial, which would rule out prints, and Overture's patchier heights are why the app tells you how many are real.

The Downloads list for the Frankfurt build: Brick map (PNG) and Isometric view (PNG), a caption reading Footprint 32x32 studs on 4 x 16x16 plates, 14 build steps, then Building instructions (PDF), 3D model (LDR) and Order these bricks (Gobricks)

The build in one caption: four 16 × 16 plates, 14 steps, the middle 32 × 32 of the view.

The designed instruction sheets are sold as a PDF at one flat price; the Building instructions (PDF) fold-out links a finished World kit to leaf through first.

Other controls, one line each

  • Ground plate off leaves only the footprints, with the basemap showing through the gaps.

  • Water appears when Land is on, for a river city that should keep its river.

  • Build the whole extent under Bricks builds every stud on screen instead of the middle 32 × 32.

  • Map layers mostly switch off when you turn Buildings on: towns and ice are drawn for kilometre-sized bricks and sit beside the real ones at street scale. Rivers & lakes stay on and switch to OpenStreetMap's water, so the Main runs through the plate at its real width.

Your turn

Open this exact skyline and change one thing: put Min building height (m) back to 50 and watch the tallest tower get its full height back, or search the street you live on.

Then send me what you made. I'll ask before I show it anywhere.

Next: Brixels → real Gobricks build. A skyline builds the same way as a mountain.

 
 
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