Tag Archives: Architecture

LEGO provides the perfect medium for recreating the buildings and landmarks of the world — LEGO has even released a line of official LEGO Architecture sets. Check out our coverage of the official sets, and don’t miss all the gorgeous architectural models created by LEGO fans from around the world.

Work in progress or finished creation?

Is Katja and Ryan’s LEGO creation a finished work or a work in progress? Well the creation itself is finished, but the church is far from finished and it is nice to see how the structure is being created from the ground up. From the flooring to the pillars to the stained glass windows, the roofing, and the gargoyles. There is also a lot going on around the church on the ground. Among the activity is a small model of what the church will look like when finished. There is a cart delivering a Madonna and Child statue and an artist creating a painting of the church to be. There are a lot of small details to behold. Can you find the poor guy getting sprayed by a skunk in the background?

Sunday best, Sunday bricks

Saxon churches are surely a familiar site in England, but this is also true of the United States as well. This LEGO church built by Pieter Dennison certainly reminds me of some churches I have seen in New England.

Revamped

Pieter utilizes a pretty simple color palette in this build – two shades of grey for the structure itself and then browns for the ground and what would be wooden components of the building. Much of the ground the building rests on is constructed using the SNOT (studs not on top) technique. The church itself is composed mainly of the usual bricks, slopes, and tiles – this is perfect as these churches were pretty simple brick structures. Some medieval minifigures oversee the reconstruction efforts of the church in this scene, which is fitting as this particular style of church was constructed between 597 AD – 1066 AD. Dennison’s build makes me imagine what “Sunday Best” would look like back in the Middle Ages.

Building bricks from bricks makes for picture-perfect architecture

The Aarhus Royal Custom House in Denmark is said to be architect Hack Kampmann’s finest work. Now, this massive minifigure-scale tribute may be the finest work of LEGO builder Poul-Erik Borre. The design is exceptionally like the actual building, but it’s even more than that. The color and texture work is impressive. Additionally, there is some awesome parts usage going on to create the angles. As someone who has tried to build complicated roofs before, I know this is no easy feat. The use of the modified 1×2’s with flexible tips to get the right shape for the rounded peaks is my favorite aspect.

Royal Customs House (Toldboden), Aarhus

There is a Youtube tour of the model promised for the future. In the meantime, take a look at Boore’s medieval village, which is featured in the LEGO House.

The play at Chapel Street

As I might have mentioned before, I am a sucker for using the old castle minifigures in creations using intriguing LEGO building techniques. Something about the mix of classic and modern just feels right to me. Atahlus latest build ticks all the boxes for me. Both buildings are filled with details. I love how the gothic building on the right is symmetrical for the most part, but some of the details are not. The offset between the woodwork and the yellow wall on the left is also quite nicely done. The base on which the houses are built is oddly shaped, which to me, always is a plus. Even the minifigures in the creation are not just there to fill the space; they tell a story (quite literally in this case).

Chapel

An autumn haven for the Post Master

Imagine a world in which the trees keep their vibrant autumn colors all year round. Vermont and New Hampshire aren’t even that charming, and they make a mint in tourism on account of their autumn leaves! Ayrlego has built such a world in LEGO and it’s called Otoño (The Autumn Isle). Here we see that a post office has recently opened in the sleepy settlement of Hojaroja on the Eslandolan Island of Otoño. When not delivering the mail, the Post Master lives upstairs in his quaint Tudor style home. I can get lost in all these details, particularly the lantern and the rustic chimney. I can imagine standing on that porch and soaking in the autumn splendor. We quite often get lost in Ayrlego’s worlds. Settle in for a while because you can too.

Post Master's House and Office, Otoño (The Autumn Isle)

A-Frame Bringing the Autumn A-Game

We are mid-way through October, and autumn, as well as spooky season, is in full effect, Andrea Lattanzio’s cozy LEGO A-Frame home located amongst some beautiful fall-colored conifers is the perfect build to capture the moment we are in.

A-Frame Cabin

The key to the main architectural build here is definitely in the tiling – we’ve got plenty of tiling on the roof, tiling for the deck, and more tiling to cover the house’s base structure. Printed tiles also help render the lumber packed away in the left, maybe for firewood. I love Lattanzio’s use of tree limb elements arranged in such a way to create pointed evergreen trees – different colors are also utilized for that autumn color-changing aesthetic. Perhaps the most interesting example of parts used in this work would be the hammer minifigure utensil which is applied in multiples to compose the foundation of the home. Many small details in this build are eye-catching, including the broken stairs leading up to this shack-like a-frame dwelling. Even if some home-improvement is needed on this little getaway house, it still looks like a great place to escape to on an autumn weekend.

Brickin’ the gap

You’ve probably never seen the Golden Gate like this before – so minimal and so orange. Simon Liu really gives us the essence of the iconic bridge down at micro-scale with this LEGO model.

Golden Gate Bridge

Liu renders San Francisco and Marin County using a variety of light brown slopes and tiles. The star of the build – the bridge itself is comprised of 1×4 tiles, minifigure hands, and binoculars all in a lovely orange color; the use of these parts is clever indeed. The micro-build as a whole sits on some trans-clear blue tiles, which serve as the strait connecting San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Although it is a minimal micro-scale build, this model certainly conveys the idea of the revered structure very well.

A Greek Villa al la Bygglek – Courtesy of Ikea

Warm, white, and rectilinear – this can describe a couple things; BYGGLEK boxes produced from the new LEGO-IKEA collab or a Greek Villa on a sunny day in Greece. Jannis Mavrostomos combines both notions into one and creates an epic LEGO house for all to enjoy while yearning for Mediterranean weather.

The backbone of Mavrostomos’s structure consists of two BYGGLEK boxes – what seems to be the small and large boxes combined. The second floor porch is nicely tiled with sand and dark tan colored tile elements of various sizes. There is a lot of great parts usage in this work, one of my favorites being the blue hinged sliding doors on the elevated porch being used as a small shade. The notches of the boxes are utilized heavily with intricate windows being built into them as well as a whole staircase. No house is complete without some plant-life, and Mavrostomos has that area covered – literally by using green tree-limb elements decorated with flowers to serve as candid vines climbing along the corner of the villa. Mavrostomos also adds potted plants to liven up the place. Overall this build is unique because it showcases cultural architecture which is subject matter not often explored in LEGO, it is quite refreshing to see something like this pop into my Instagram feed.

Show them the door

Take a drive through any East Coast city in America, small or large, and you’ll find brownstone townhouses, their facades almost like familiar faces. Eli Willsea incorporates this sense of familiarity into his intricate brick-built brownstone doorway.

Doorway

The building façade’s construction is cleverly composed of grey 1×1 jumpers with dark orange 1×1 and 1×2 tiles – this construction approach achieves a brick and mortar aesthetic. The door itself is comprised of mostly yellow tiling with some silver matte pieces to render the doorknob, mail slot, and door knocker. Willsea uses various white elements, including hinge pieces, 1×1 scroll bricks, cylinders, 1×2 slopes, and claw pieces to render a moderately decorated trim. Perhaps the most ornate part of this build is the lunette – the half-moon shaped window above the door, which is mostly composed of yellow 9V track switches – a pretty unusual element, along with some yellow tiles of various shapes and a minifigure head. I appreciate Willsea throwing in some urban foliage, including some vines climbing up the façade along with a few other LEGO plant elements sparsely populating the ground. This build, although simple in the subject, certainly gets my mind out of the suburbs and back into the city.

An alternative to coarse sand and cold space

Most Star Wars sets and fan creations tend to take the form of ships or other types of vehicles, of course LEGO has welcomed more buildings recently but such builds are still a minority in the theme. Eloi Parizeau takes us to Naboo not in a starship but with his LEGO micro-build of the Theed Royal Palace.

Naboo Theed Palace

The nicest thing about working in micro-scale is that a builder is able to use small parts that are actually pretty common or easy to obtain, Parizeau’s structural build of the palace consists of some pretty standard parts in varying shapes and sizes such as dishes, cones, tiles, and slopes. The colors he utilizes for this creation as a whole are a little uncommon including pieces in forest green, tan, and sand green. The one part that seems rather unique to me is the rock panel in dark grey.

Naboo Theed Palace

Using these small pieces Parizeau not only recreates the structure of the Theed Palace, but also the beautiful and lush environment of Naboo, his use of the forest green slopes and bricks along with the trans-clear blue elements brings back scenes from the Star Wars prequel films which portrayed Naboo as a blue planet filled with green vegetation. All things considered, Parizeau’s LEGO rendition of this Star Wars universe building is quite unique. It will definitely be great to see more fictional architecture brought to us by the brick in the future.

A shrine to all raised baseplates

LEGO raised baseplates–some builders love them and some hate them. Personally I love seeing builders innovatively integrate raised baseplates into their creations and Sebastian Arts does just that with his build of an East Asian-styled temple sitting upon the raised baseplate from the LEGO Knights Kingdom theme dating back to the 2000s.

Temple of the Raised Baseplate

Click to see more of this creation

With 100 magazine foil bags, the sky is the limit

Most builders love a good challenge, but everyone loves free LEGO. Such was my reaction when my LEGO user group, Brickish, selected me to represent them in a build challenge. In this friendly competition amongst UK and Ireland-based LUGs, the task was to build anything using the parts provided in 100 LEGO Star Wars magazine foil packs. These were provided by Fairy Bricks charity, and contained 10 each of 10 small sets. I (Mansur “Waffles” Soeleman) challenged myself to take these small Star Wars models and… not build anything Star Wars related. There weren’t much of the usual grey bits anyway. So I had my next favourite thing in mind: microscale architecture.

The Voyage to Cirrus Palace

I had no plan going into this build challenge. But the parts provided were surprisingly good – lots of small bits that I use in my building style. I knew I was going to surprised myself with the finished results, and I did, for such is the nature of any challenge. It definitely produced a beautiful build I am most proud of: The Voyage to Cirrus Palace.

Read more about my build process