The Metamaze is a spatial labyrinth, playground, artificial cave and hideaway at Elys Boulderloft in Basel, Switzerland.

On a footprint of 25 m², the intertwined tunnel system has a total lenght of nearly 50 meters. The panels are CNC cut 24 mm birch plywood and connected with German made steel connectors.

The Metamaze is built in accordance with EN 1176, the european standard for playground equipment. The geometry of the cells is based on 3D voronoi and developed in Rhino using customized commands. The design process involves a lot of back and forth. Most of the repetitive tasks are therefore automated with Grasshopper.

192 individual parts with a total length of 762 meters of angled saw cuts and 4757 holes in various dimensions were exported in woodWOP specific DXF files with my own Grasshopper script. A summary of all CNC operations was streamed from Grasshopper to Excel to calculate the cost. Providing all this data and the seamless import of all parts into woodWOP drastically minimized the manual effort in programming and guaranteed flawless fabrication on a Homag 5-axis CNC machine…

The Metamaze shown above is a custom design for Elys Boulderloft.

Are you interested in getting your own Metamaze at your indoor location?
Please get in touch with me…