scapebysam lives up to his name with this beautiful scale LEGO build of the Gold Coast in Australia. It is not just the breadth of this build that stands out. scapebysam has truly put wonderful detail on everything, being true to the buildings of the city. And while the builder calls out Q1, Australia’s tallest building, it’s the edgy Jewel towers that catch my eye.
From this angle, we can see the multi-faceted Jewel in the foreground, and the tall Q1 clad in sand blue in the background.
And taking the top-down vantage, you can make out all the roads lining up with the coast. There’s so much detail put into the different intersection designs, as well as road angles relative to the grid of city blocks.
Viewing the model from its north, the “Brickvention” printed tile along the side comes into view. This isn’t the only bit of Aussie coastline covered by this builder. Be sure to visit their Flickr account for swatches of LEGO microscale Sydney and Perth
Impressive. Was this built with regular Lego bricks? I seem to recall reading that Lego make special bricks for architects?
This is made from standard bricks. You might be thinking of Modulex, the line of smaller bricks that LEGO once put out for architects. Modulex has a very limited range of colors and shapes and couldn’t be used for something with this range of color and texture (and given how tiny those bricks are, it would be nearly impossible to source that many of the bricks!) LEGO also releases standard sets under the Architecture line, many of which are at what’s called “microscale,” which is any scale well below minifig scale (1:48). This model of the Gold Coast is also at microscale. Microscale builds use standard bricks, but often parts get recontextualized from how they might be used at minifig scale, like a wand from Harry Potter becoming a radio antenna or ship’s mast.
Thank you, Jake. Your reply is an interesting “microscale” article in itself.
I’ve seen minifigure rapiers used as antenna on minifigure scale vehicles, and this takes it to another level.