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.

The wheel of time is a game of roulette, and the Roman Empire lost

Sometimes, history is quite literally the foundation of the present. This creation is one such example, but with an interesting duality: not only does it represent medieval structures built upon ancient ruins, but it is also literally a rebuild of Antonio Carretti‘s earlier LEGO Forum of Nerva, which we also featured here on The Brothers Brick. The creations very obviously represant the same structure, despite the contrast between a shiny new temple and fortified ruins.

The dark red and orange tower blends with the remains of the temple beautifully, and the white details in the house on the left really show how the stairs of the temple were used to build it. My favourite part is definetely the overgrown and decrepit temple itself, with its former glory hardly recognizable anymore, replaced with an impression of great age and a long and tragic history.

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From a convent in Brazil to LEGO on your screen

Microscale builds are great for fantasy castles and sprawling sci-fi cities done on the cheap, but it’s also a great tool for recreating real buildings with a reasonably small number of pieces. Brazilian builder Gilcelio chagas has done that with the Penha Convent, which is located in the Vila Velha region of Brazil. Compare the build to pictures of the site and you’ll see the effort that has gone into making this look authentic at such a small scale. Make sure you also spot the clever used of an army helmet as the top of rounded tree and an alternate view that offers a better look at the build of the mountain that the convent sits on.

A skyline view of Flemish architecture

Belgium doesn’t feature in the LEGO Architecture theme yet but Bert Van Raemdonck has corrected this oversight with his own skyline view of the Flemish municipality of Temse. His skyline of Temse creation includes, from left to right, Boelwerf Crane, Onze Lieve Vrouwe Church, Old Town Hall and Temse Bridge. As with a lot of microscale builds we feature, Bert has used some clever parts and techniques to pack texture and detail into a small space. I love the helmet that forms the spire of the church and the lever handle flagpoles on the side of the town hall. You will need to look closely at the church to spot the clever placement of tiles forming the buttresses.

The Old Town Hall is a magnificent piece of neo-Flemish renaissance architecture so my only critique would be the lack of colour as the actual building is a fantastic shade of pinky red and tan.

TBB cover photo: August 2017

Summer (if you live in the Northern hemisphere) is movie blockbuster season, and it’s already turning out to be a good one! What better choice for our August cover photo than this beautifully decked out retro movie theater façade by RVA LUG, which comes complete with LEGO-themed posters and is illuminated using 260 lights.

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Obsolescence is the price of progress

Finding beauty in decay may be difficult and an acquired taste, but this scene by Revan New is so realistic, I believe everyone can appreciate the LEGO building skills on display. The photography and editing help a lot in achieving the effect, but the build itself is nothing to scoff at.

The uneven angles, hanging chains, and cluttered floor show obvious disuse, and the metal supports everywhere give it a strong industrial look. The composition is excellent, with moody lighting revealing a few splashes of yellow, around which the whole scene seems to be built.

Hong Kong skyline in a island

While architecture skyline builds are a popular way to capture some of the landmark structures of a city, city son has created this fantastic mountainous sculpture of Hong Kong’s landmarks. At the base we have the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre with its glass façade, surrounded by Golden Bauhinia Square. Dominating the scene is the Big Buddha with the Ngong Ping 360 cable car and Peak Tram exiting the mountainside, all of which are located on Lantau Island, Hong Kong’s largest outlying island.

What a great way to capture some of the highs of Hong Kong, although Big Buddha doesn’t look impressed with the cable car exiting his head!

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 display of amazing builds features the Haw Pha Bang temple in Laos, built masterfully by Singaporean Eugene Tan. The builder toiled on this labour of love for over 90 hours from start to finish and used an estimated total of 13,000 bricks.

While I admire the exquisite detailing, it’s worth highlighting that the real challenge behind this majestic temple is the adornment of gold, a color that LEGO does not offer a very broad palette of elements to work with. Stay tuned for our coverage of the UNESCO World Heritage Exhibition for more amazing places in the world imagined in LEGO.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This tiny version of Cinderella’s Castle uses 3000 pieces

While an impressive set, 71040 The Disney Castle disappointed builder Swan Dutchman in the fact that it was only a facade and did not encompass the rest of the castle “in the round”. To fix this, Swan built his own microscale version, if we can call it that, because the finished build is actually rather large. It’s built on top of a 48 x 48 baseplate and contains around 3000 small pieces.

Big numbers aside (and not even mentioning that it took three months to create) this is a brilliant build that is instantly recognisable. There’s a lot of clever techniques, such as gears used in the turrets for stone detail and the use of two different kinds of 2 x 2 round bricks. Make sure you take a few minutes to soak up not only the castle, but the builds around it in the body of water, brick road, and vegetation.

Eco-friendly living in the green house

They say a house is not a home without a cat, but despite being a cat-lover I would say that a house is not a home without an awesome home gym and fully equipped kitchen. I would be very happy to move into this eco-friendly sustainable Green House by Swedish builder Sarah. Extending from the rock-face, this house makes full use of the sun’s power with solar panels and lots of windows for light. The central column has a nice colour combination to tone in with the surrounding natural environment.

See more of this green house after the jump

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

When thinking about LEGO, bright primary colors quickly come to mind. So when someone builds a LEGO creation using only natural earth tones, like Maxim Baybakov has done with his lovely minifig-scale library, the creation almost doesn’t register as LEGO. The effect here is quite stunning. Just remove the minifigures and this wonderfully textured and detailed building looks like a photograph of a real place.