Materializing the City of Dreams: Sagalassos

Sagalassos is an archeological site in southwestern Turkey under the supervision of Professor Marc Waelkens from the Catholic University of Leuven. It is a tremendous archeological research project that started in 1990 and has exposed us to many of the hidden treasures from the city’s intriguing past. To celebrate the great work that has been done on this project, the Gallo Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium decided to exhibit many of the found treasures including a fully reconstructed miniature model of the
ancient city.

It is for the reconstructed miniature model that our mother company Materialise played a huge role. The entire city got 3D printed in the stereolithography method and covers an almost 2 by 1 meter surface. This same model is currently on display at the museum and will stay there until the end of the exhibition which is the 17th of June of 2012. Below you’ll find an overview of the work in progress and also the final result.

A birds eye view of the final 3D print

The real life location on Google Maps

To get a sense of scale, we''ve placed a 1L bottle next to the model

Got inspired but came to the conclusion that the city of Sagalassos seems too big of a project to try out at home? No worries, every city must start with a single building and for this we have a great tool for you. Test your architectural skills with Google SketchUp and our SketchUp Plugin. Who knows… maybe you might be the next one to be building the city of your dreams one building at a time.

For more information and guidelines on creating amazing architectural structures with Google SketchUp, click here.

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