3D print The Gherkin
A free, printable model of the Gherkin at 30 St Mary Axe, with the surrounding City of London towers and narrow streets, generated from real map data in your browser.
Free, in your browser. Exports a slicer-ready 3MF.
About The Gherkin
The tower at 30 St Mary Axe, once called the Swiss Re Building, houses offices in the City of London, London's main financial district. Its shape earned it the nickname the Gherkin, after the vegetable. Work finished in December 2003, and the doors opened in April 2004. Its 41 floors reach 180 m (591 ft). It occupies the land of two earlier buildings, the Chamber of Shipping and the Baltic Exchange, which a bomb badly damaged in 1992.
After the plan for the 92-story Millennium Tower was abandoned, Foster + Partners and the Arup Group designed this tower instead, and Skanska built it, starting in 2001. Swiss Re, its main tenant, commissioned the tower as its UK head office. The panoramic dome at the top, called the Lens, echoes the glass dome that once covered part of the Baltic Exchange. Although the whole tower is curved, only one piece of its glass is curved: the lens-shaped cap on top.
Six shafts formed by gaps in the floors were meant to ventilate it naturally, though glass partitions added by tenants kept the system from working as designed. Energy-saving methods mean it needs only half the power of a comparable tower. Its fully triangulated perimeter structure, designed by Arup, makes it rigid enough without extra reinforcement. The tower won the 2003 Emporis Skyscraper Award, its architect received the 2004 Stirling Prize, and a 2005 survey of the world's largest architecture firms named it the world's most admired new building.
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 | 48 mm | 1:3,750 |
| 200 mm | 60 mm | 1:3,000 |
| 256 mm | 77 mm | 1:2,344 |
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North
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East
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South
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West
- A diamond-lattice skin
- Crossing diagonal bars wrap the whole tower. Print friendly adapts this fine lattice to the print scale; use Full detail on a larger print, with 0.12–0.16 mm layers, to keep the diamonds sharp.
- A curved, tapering profile
- The tower bulges in the middle and narrows to a rounded top. Thin layers give the curve a smoother finish, and slow printing helps the narrow top.
- One piece with the ground
- The Gherkin 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 Gherkin 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 Gherkin 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 Gherkin 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 Gherkin grows with the print: about 48 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.
