Abstract. Voronoi diagrams are a fundamental geometric data structure for obtaining proximity relations. We consider collections of axis-aligned orthogonal polyhedra in two and three-dimensional space under the max-norm, which is a particularly useful scenario in certain application domains. We construct the exact Voronoi diagram inside an orthogonal polyhedron with holes defined by such polyhedra. Our approach avoids creating full-dimensional elements on the Voronoi diagram and yields a skeletal representation of the input object. We introduce a complete algorithm in 2D and 3D that follows the subdivision paradigm relying on a bounding-volume hierarchy; this is an original approach to the problem. The complexity is adaptive and comparable to that of previous methods.