I am building reliefs since many years. Together with Konrad Weber from Oftringen we are focussing on Swiss and especially mountainous regions all over the world.
The fascination is the feeling of the third dimension, the feeling to experience the plasticity of a complex topography. In contrast to the map the third dimension becomes reality. A map may give you the feeling of knowing the region already, but a relief makes an even more deep impression. One is almost forced to say: I have to feeling as if I was already there.

There are numerous methods and techniques to build a relief. I think every relief builder has its own special technique. We also have an own technique, which is probably a bit more different from the common ones. As much as we know no one practices relief construction in this way. In the following I give a short introduction into our technique. Hint: A much more detailed introduction into our technique you can find here (german only, pdf-format, ~2 MBytes).

First the base map with height information is xeroxed in the right scale. After that the lines of equal height are copied onto cardboard, you get a carbon copy of your height information then (have a look at the picture below).

Every tenth or twentieth line of equal height is copied to the same cardboard sheet, depending on how narrow we want to have the lines on the sheet. We need thus 10 or 20 cardboard sheets to build our relief.
The copied lines of equal height are afterwards cut out with a cutter. The slices, that look like thin sausages are finally glued together.

The reliefs built with our technique are not solid, they are empty in the inner parts. First this is absolutely not necessary because they get their stability later by further glue and second you save a lot of material. Hence our reliefs are empty and just have a crust of about 1 to 2cm depending on the slope of the region.

After sticking together the cutted "saussages" the whole relief is "glued" again to attain some stability. As the next step, we construct some pillars that are used to enhanced stability. They are invisible later after the construction of a box around the relief. But before that a first layer of colour is put on. Then some faulty "regions" are corrected by knife. Furthermore in order to emphasize some special parts of the relief, some fine work is done with the cutter.
After putting another layer of colour a border and a ground is build with cardboard. Finally the relief is painted as natural as possible.

Our reliefs are not free of steps. This is intended to be so in order to emphasize its accuracy. Some examples of our work you find in the Reliefs: examples article (see menu on the left).

200-300 hours per m2 is needed to construct a complete relief using our technique.

Since January 2003 Konrad Webers relief site is online. His web address is www.reliefs.ch
There you can find lots of information about reliefs but you can also order one if you like. Furthermore, a lot of information about his person can be found on his website.