Meow Wolf Creates Immersive Large-Scale Art

A Meow Wolf exhibit feels less like a building and more like another dimension. Visitors are invited to touch, explore, and participate as walls ooze, sculptures move, and sounds react. Behind that experience is a mechanical design challenge unlike most traditional product development.

“Meow Wolf is a fever dream company that has taken artists’ visions and made them real and tangible,” enthuses Allen Couch, Meow Wolf CAD & Engineering Manager. According to Zeve Cohen, Meow Wolf Designer & Fabricator, “Meow Wolf is an immersive art exhibit. We build worlds of story and artwork while getting people to think and engage their curiosity.”

These worlds are made possible not just by imagination, but by a disciplined integration of art and engineering that turns wildly creative ideas into buildable reality.

Meow Wolf’s immersive environments are developed through cross-disciplinary collaboration, translating conceptual art into large-scale, physically constructed spaces that support audience-driven exploration. Meow Wolf started in 2008 as a small collective of artists in Santa Fe, New Mexico and now brings together artists, digital designers, engineers, and fabricators from widely different backgrounds. “We come from all walks of life, from all skills, all talents,” Couch notes. “We have sculptors, we have painters, we have people that build in metal, we have people that build in wood, and we have digital fabricators.”

That diversity of artistic mediums sometimes fuels a high level of complexity with surprises around every corner. Artists may envision interactive sculptures or organic forms that defy traditional CAD geometry. As Cohen explains, “An artist will come up with some crazy idea of a sculpture and interactive they wanna make but not have the technical know-how to bring to life.”

The ideas must ultimately become fabricated and installed physical structures that thousands of visitors each year can safely interact with.

Early concepts at Meow Wolf often begin literally as a sketch on a napkin. SOLIDWORKS® Design plays a central role in turning those early ideas into detailed digital models, including a key role in bringing every intangible and tangible detail of an artist’s exhibit to life as 3D renderings.

For organic shapes, the workflow often starts with a physical sculpture that is scanned and brought into SOLIDWORKS Design, where engineering structure is developed. Couch continues, “We'll take that and bring it in, and we'll build a steel or aluminum armature beneath it. And we will work on simulating the motion [to determine] how this thing moves and is supposed to work.”

Unlike gallery art, Meow Wolf’s installations are designed to be touched, climbed on, and explored. “We need to design our projects to be strong and robust because thousands of guests a year interact with them,” emphasizes Cohen. “We need to make sure they're safe for lots of people to use.”

SOLIDWORKS Design helps engineers design for durability by enabling them to evaluate dimensions, materials, and weights early in the process. “We'll use SOLIDWORKS in terms of a design review to help facilitate what we call NTEs, not-to-exceed dimensions,” Couch explains. “And we'll analyze materials and weights [in SOLIDWORKS] to make sure that the thing isn't gonna weigh 10,000 pounds and break through the floor.”

Meow Wolf fabricates many components in house, including extensive steel weldments and sheet metal parts. “We're creating a lot of steel weldments,” Cohen notes. “The sheet metal environment in SOLIDWORKS is really useful for that fabrication method.”

Equally important is the connection between drawings and models. “What's great about SOLIDWORKS is that the drawing files are [parametrically] linked to the 3D models.” If changes are made to the drawing, updates to the model happen automatically and vice versa. “It saves a lot of time,” Couch concludes. “It is a huge time saver.”

Meow Wolf also works with architectural partners who use other design tools. “A lot of our models are coming from other software [tools],” Couch explains. SOLIDWORKS makes translation a breeze. “We bring those files into SOLIDWORKS, establish reference geometry and planes, and develop the design directly in its final context.” That flexibility allows Meow Wolf teams to coordinate across disciplines while maintaining control over the final design intent.

For Meow Wolf, engineering is not a constraint on creativity but what makes creativity possible at scale. “To be able to pull off what we make takes planning and forward thinking and a lot of technical know-how,” Cohen emphasizes.

Couch continues, “Without SOLIDWORKS, I think the exhibits would be a mess and take 10 times longer … I don't think they would be as safe, either.”

Through disciplined design workflows in SOLIDWORKS, Meow Wolf turns unconventional ideas into buildable, safe, immersive physical experiences. In a world built on curiosity and interaction, strong engineering literally keeps imagination standing at this company.