Majestic golden temple of Hwa Pha Bang

This astonishing golden temple is one of seven new additions to the Piece of Peace World Tour, opening this week in Singapore. This dispaly of amazing builds features the Haw Pha Bang temple in Laos, built masterful Singaporean builder Eugene Tan. The builder toiled on this labour of love for over 90 hours from start to finish with an estimated total of 13,000 bricks. While we admire the exquisite detailing, it’s worth highlighting the challenge behind this majestic temple are the adornments of gold which LEGO elements do not have a large palette to work with. Stay tuned for our coverage of the UNESCO World Heritage Exhibition for more amazing places in the world imagined in LEGO.

Haw Pha Bang 4
Haw Pha Bang 5

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I suspect this submarine will have many fans

This month I am taking part in the ABS Builder Challenge against Legofin, Julien Andries, and Aaron Newman, all of which have already built more than two creations using the minifigure handheld fan seed part. I am a little behind, as this submarine is only my first entry to the contest. However, I think the extra time was well spent, as I am very happy with how the build turned out. It uses the fan part a total of 12 times, 16 including those used on the fish as fins. Four of these are used as an intake, barely visible on the bottom of the cockpit.

Deep Sea Explorer

Eight are used on the back as the fins on the propellers:

Deep Sea Explorer back

I probably should have saved the fish for a separate entry, since this is such a hard part to find uses for, but they fit so well here and added a lot to the photo, I just couldn’t resist.

Full assortment of Star Wars: The Last Jedi LEGO sets revealed [News]

Today we’re getting our first official look at LEGO’s initial wave of sets for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. If the release schedule follows that of Rogue One and The Force Awakens, the sets will hit store shelves in September. We don’t have part counts or prices yet, but you can check out what the First Order and Resistance have been getting up to with a host of new ships. While all of these sets will be available before the movie’s release, those keen on avoiding all spoilers may want to look with a guarded eye. We’ll just leave you with this awesome Ultimate Collector’s Series-style BB-8 above the fold, and you can see all the sets below.

75187 BB-8

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Remember the Great Sept of Baelor

This microscale scene is instantly recognizable: the Great Sept of Baelor in Kings Landing from HBO’s Game of Thrones, built by Antonio Cerretti. It’s so lovely to have a reminder of the Sept’s beauty and splendor. It’s a shame it’s no longer a location seen anymore – at least, not in the way pictured here. The other homes and buildings are simple and easily identifiable. The fountain and statue using the white horn stands out, and the textured brick for the steps makes it clear just how much of a hill the building sat on.

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Beauty and craftsmanship under one roof

Have you ever watched someone blow glass? It takes patience, persistence, and a good helping of being able to move on when your gorgeous work of art crashes at the last moment. It happens a lot, by my understanding. Builder mike m. has presented us a brick-built workshop, in a scale we don’t often see: Technic figures! The use of Hagrid’s hair works really well, and allows for such detail with the tools and glass.

" The Glassblower " close up

Traditional Japanese machiya is beautifully simple

Machiya are traditional wooden townhouses found throughout Japan and typified in the historical capital of Kyoto. This LEGO version of a machiya by Dan Blom is a great example of a seemingly simple build that really looks the part. The key architectural details like the barred window, known as mushiko mado [literal translation is ‘insect cage window’] and the wooden lattice façade are accurately represented. These days most roofs are covered with clay tiles called kawara, and Dan has left the LEGO studs exposed to give the impression of neatly arranged, rough tiles.

hus japan C4

The addition of some extra little details such as the cart, the various items outside the front of the house and the ancient-looking tree complete the scene perfectly.

Step inside a typical Malaysian heritage house

Heritage houses are wonderful older styled buildings with a typical façade that can be found dotted around many locations in Malaysia. Vincent Kiew has created a beautiful LEGO heritage house complete with detailed interior. I love the façade with its wooden louvre shutters and architectural decorations above the arched windows. The use of a mix of white and older yellowed white bricks really adds to the ‘antiquated’ appearance. The same slightly worn down appearance is provided by the mix of colours in the main left hand side of the house with light grey, white and the odd sand green brick as an aesthetic colour scheme.

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Vincent has created a detailed interior for the house, complete with kitchen, living room, bedroom, study, toilet and more. The build is an accurate representation of a typical house and is structurally sound despite being made of LEGO.

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It’s worthwhile taking a closer look at all the fantastic interior details that have been added. Most of the interior decorations and furniture are made of wood or stone with some lovely artistic details.

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If you liked Vincent’s heritage house, you may also enjoy his LEGO recreation of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown that we featured last month.

Celebrate the new Ragnarok trailer with a classic Thor Brickhead

Love or hate Brickheadz, seeing the community create their own versions of characters has been a treat (see our recent roundup of some recent good ones). And now builder tommilorenzo has given the blocky treatment to Thor. Although, this is the more classical version of Thor, and not the more recent Marvel incarnation you’ve seen in the newest Ragnarok trailer.

Brick Headz: Classic Thor

The coolest California condor I’ve ever seen

Living in southern California, I hear a lot about the California condor during my frequent visits to the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park. And rightly so, because in 1987 condors went extinct in the wild, with only twenty-two individuals remaining in captivity. With the help of the LA Zoo, these three institutions bred the condors in captivity and reintroduced them into the wild. Now their combined population is over 440. Aaron Newman has built a deceptively small version of the condor in LEGO bricks, and the result is wonderful.

The California Condor

The model makes perfect usage of the minifig fan piece, the seed part for the current round of the ABS Builder Challenge, along with many other assorted spike parts, and minifigure katanas.

These two Bionicles are not identical

This is one of my creations that has been waiting for a few months to be uploaded, for many irrelevant reasons. I think this one takes a bit of insight to be appreciated fully. While my build (on the left) is a servicable mechanical build on its own, its true strengths can only be appreciated if compared to the original LEGO Bionicle 8532 Onua set on the right, as this is a piece-by-piece LEGO System recreation of the classic first generation Toa Onua set. My version is completely unstable and unplayable, but visually comes close enough to the official version that it passes my personal quality standard.

Toa Onua side-by-side comparison

This was a somewhat quick build, but I was so inspired by the idea that it completely took over my life for a few days. It strikes me that Bionicle (or as the cool kids call it these days, “bonkle”) is quite similar to classic space in a way – while classic space is the most popular nostalgic theme for many older LEGO fans, Bionicle is the go-to nostalgia trip for ones growing up in the early 2000s, which makes it surprising how rare reproductions are. There are few even in the actual Bionicle building genre, but besides my build, I have only seen one other example of systemized Toa, but even that was just the builder taking his own spin on the concept.

Now, I have indeed built Toa Onua (because this one is the easiest to build due to wide selection of parts in both of his primary colours, black and very dark grey), and I see myself being able to build Toa Kopaka, but for any other ones my selection of parts just can not do. So here is a challenge to any builder brave enough and equipped for it: I would love to see more of the first generation Bionicle characters (or later ones?) made out of system parts!

This LEGO Zoid is much bigger than it seems

While LEGO builds based on Zoids have been done in the past, it’s still awesome to see them, especially at a large scale. This Blade Liger by d’ Qiu Brick is deceptively presented in these pictures, as it’s much bigger than the first time you glance at it. Focus on the rather large orange windscreen in the middle of the head to get a sense of scale. Yeah, this thing is huge.

Blade Liger

Individual parts usage doesn’t suffer at this huge scale, with simple but effective building going on everywhere. The segmented areas on the legs and head are really pleasing to look at, and the large blocky proportions give it that robotic feel to mix in with the clearly animal form. Make sure you spend some time on the builder’s photostream for more angles of this build.

Blade Liger

Watch the first teaser trailer for Brick Madness [Video]

Back in 2012, filmmaker Justin McAleece used Bricks by the Bay as a background to film scenes for his independent film Brick Madness. Five years later, the director has shared the first official teaser trailer for the mockumentary, scheduled to premiere on August 13.

Brick MADNESS Teaser Trailer from Blare Media on Vimeo.

One of the really cool real-life aspects of the movie is that Carl Merriam designed many of the models used by the actors in the movie back during filming, and now Carl works full-time as a set designer in Billund.