New Orleans, Louisiana 3D Wood Map | Laser-Cut Birch Depth Chart
How the Water Becomes Wood
A chart is a stack of flat sheets until the water's real soundings tell it what shape to take.
- SurveyReal bathymetric sounding data sets every contour line before a single cut is made.
- CutEach depth band is laser-cut from its own sheet of Baltic birch, up to nine layers deep.
- StainWater layers are stained by hand, reading darker the deeper the water runs.
- StackThe sheets are registered and stacked in sequence, and the bed's true shape rises out of the wood.
- EtchDepths and place names are burned into the grain itself, never printed on it.
- FrameA solid Baltic birch frame and acrylic glass finish the piece, ready to hang.
New Orleans in stacked Baltic birch, 13.5 by 31 inches: the Crescent City carved one depth contour per layer, held between the river that made it and the lake that names its weekends.
New Orleans lives in the squeeze: the Mississippi bends its deep crescent past the French Quarter, much of the city sits below the river's surface behind its levees, and Lake Pontchartrain spreads north, crossed by the Causeway, the longest continuous bridge over water in the world at nearly twenty-four miles. The Algiers ferry still crosses the river the old way, and the lakefront's seawall steps have hosted generations of sunset loitering. On the chart, the river's engraved trench, startlingly deep against the shallow lake's broad pale layers, explains the city's whole precarious, glorious arrangement.
Each contour is a separate laser-cut sheet, stacked by hand and engraved, behind acrylic glass in a solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light.
Between the river and the lake, as the saying goes: both are here, honestly measured.
The engraving spans the crescent and the Quarter, the Industrial Canal, the lakefront, and the Causeway's line north. The whole basin runs on the Gulf of Mexico chart.
- 13.5 × 31 in
- Solid Baltic birch frame in Dark or Light
- Acrylic glass front, ready to hang
- Free next-business-day shipping on orders placed by 2 PM EST
- 14-day returns
Live from the water