3D print The Bow
A free, printable model of The Bow, a curved tower with a diagonal lattice on its facade, standing among other tall buildings, generated from real map data in your browser.
Free, in your browser. Exports a slicer-ready 3MF.
About The Bow
Standing in Downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada, The Bow is a skyscraper with 158,000 square meters (1,700,000 sq ft) of space. It was Calgary's tallest building from July 8, 2010, when it passed the Suncor Energy Centre, to May 11, 2016, when Brookfield Place overtook it. It is considered the beginning of the redevelopment of Downtown East Village in Calgary.
Plans for the tower were made public by EnCana Corporation in 2006, and the name refers to the crescent shape and to the view of the Bow River. Foster + Partners released the first designs on October 12, 2006, working with Zeidler Partnership Architects of Calgary. The form derives from a 1996 Foster + Partners concept for the Millennium Tower in London that was never built. The finished tower is 11 meters lower than first planned, after worries about shadows on pathways along the Bow River.
Work began with a groundbreaking on June 13, 2007. Crews built a parkade with six underground levels spanning two blocks on either side of 6th Avenue. The York Hotel next door, dating from 1929 to 1930, was torn down, and 70 to 80 percent of its brick went into rebuilding two of its outside walls. The Bow was finished in 2012 for the oil and gas company Encana. Azure magazine placed it among the world's ten best architectural projects of that year.
How it prints
Make this print opens the generator on a 600 m square around the landmark. Buildings print at close to true scale, so the landmark grows with the print size.
| Print size | Landmark height | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| 160 mm default | 64 mm | 1:3,750 |
| 200 mm | 80 mm | 1:3,000 |
| 256 mm | 102 mm | 1:2,344 |
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North
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East
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South
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West
- Diagonal lattice on a curve
- A diagonal lattice wraps the curved facade. Print friendly adapts it to the print scale; Full detail keeps every bar, which suits a larger print or a fine nozzle.
- Tall curved face
- The tower is tall, with a concave side. Layers of 0.12 to 0.16 mm keep the fine vertical lines of the facade crisp.
- One piece with the ground
- The Bow is joined to the ground in the exported file, and the four-side check found no floating parts, so nothing needs gluing.
- Pick the detail for your nozzle
- In the Buildings settings, set Landmark detail to Print friendly to adapt thin parts and small details to the print scale. Full detail keeps every modeled feature, for larger prints or a finer nozzle.
- Colors
- Buildings, roads, water and ground arrive as separate filament slots in the 3MF. The Bow takes the building color.
- File format
- You get a 3MF for Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer or PrusaSlicer. Any of them can save it as STL if you need one.
About this model
The Bow is one of more than 2,300 landmark models in Mini Skyline. They are made with AI, and each one is checked from four sides in its real surroundings before release. Everything around it is built from OpenStreetMap and Overture map data. If you would rather print the shape from map data, turn off Landmark models in the Buildings settings.
Common questions
Is there a The Bow STL I can download?
Mini Skyline builds the file for you in your browser and exports 3MF, which every major slicer opens. If you need an STL, open the 3MF in your slicer and export it from there.
How big can I print it?
Any print size from 40 mm across. The Bow grows with the print: about 64 mm tall on the default 160 mm print. For a model larger than your printer bed, Project Mode splits the area into tiles.
Is it free?
Yes. Generation runs in your browser, with no account and nothing behind a paywall.
