You click the link and there they are: the world's tallest buildings, stacked like Minecraft blocks floating in white space. Each block is 40 meters. Burj Khalifa rises in discrete chunks until it disappears off the top of your screen.

Alexa Cristina built this one as part of her ongoing experiments with 3D maps and WebGL. She's a cartographer and data viz developer from Cluj-Napoca, Romania, who spends her time making the kind of stuff that makes you tilt your head and go "wait, how." This project pulls building height data and renders it in Three.js with a blocky, almost brutalist aesthetic. One block equals four floors. Count them if you want. The abstraction makes the scale hit different than a realistic render would.

The technical bit: pure client-side WebGL, no map tiles, just procedural geometry based on height values. Simple vertex manipulation, clean shader work, nothing fancy. Check the maptheclouds.com playground for more experiments, or browse her GitHub where she's got repos like buildings-experiments and map-challenges-2023 full of GLSL shaders, Three.js scenes, and cartographic rabbit holes. If you want to see what else she's building, follow her on X.