During a recent constitutional in Cortlandia, your Bernalwood editor met Neighbor Miles Epstein as he was preparing to photograph his new artwork: a topographically accurate cross-section of Cortland Avenue, created entirely from sheets of cardboard. Neighbor Miles writes:
3D Surface Modeling – The Cortland Map Project
Inspired by finishing an extraordinarily flat cork tabletop, I fell into this idea of modeling our local commercial street. Cortland Avenue runs east/west for 0.9miles. Branching off Mission St at 140 feet above sea level Cortland crests at 240 feet before descending sharply to Bayshore Ave, resting flat at just 20 feet above the waves.
Turns out, Neighbor Miles is friendly with the folks at New Wheel on Cortland, and his 3-D map was assembled from scrap cardboard collected from the store.
He mapped it out based on the amazing 5′ topo map of Bernal Heights created by the legendary Eric Fisher (and shared on Bernalwood a few years ago). Then Neighbor Miles reproduced the contours of Bernal by gluing custom-cut pieces of cardboard together to create the entire length of Cortland from Mission to Bayshore. Take a closer took:
Neighbor Miles tells Bernalwood he was directly inspired by the work of Neighbor Gregory Gavin, and on his website, Neighbor Miles reveals that he even built a version of his Cardboard Cortland that uses the streets as structural ribs. Check this out:
Woa. Mind blown! Amazing! Geektastic! Brilliant! Inspiring!
Well done, Neighbor Miles.
Now… A CARDBOARD CONTOUR OF ALL OF BERNAL HEIGHTS, PLEASE?
PHOTOS: Telstar Logistics (above) and Miles Epstein (below)
Bernalwood 
Incorrugatable.
Excellent
Plenty of cardboard (archival) over here if you’d like some!
Love the piece!
The one with the street spines is epic!!
Fantastic. Kudos to Neighbor Miles. He is not only creative but also environmentally prudent with the use of that cardboard.
Doing this with cardboard stacked vertically is hard mode. Much easier to cut out sheets of cardboard following contours and lay them down horizontally.
yes, understood…but the advantage of the vertical glue (toast, not islands) is the ultimate strength of the finished piece.
the challenge for me was to find the individual lines for each individual piece.