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.

Supersized LEGO Architecture 21028 New York City skyline

One of my favorite LEGO Architecture sets of the last few years have been the city skyline series, including 21028 New York City. LEGO architect Spencer_R specializes in 1/650 scale models of landmarks, including numerous skyscrapers. Spencer says he’d already built several of the buildings in the set, so he built the Flatiron building and Statue of Liberty, and then put all of them on a large black base. This much larger scale enables Spencer to include much more detail than the minuscule buildings in the official set, and the higher-resolution photo on Flickr — as well as Spencer’s photostream as a whole — is well worth a closer look.

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Hit the court at the Squash Centrum Maastricht

Reader Berthil van Beek tells us that he’s been playing squash for more than 30 years, the most recent 5 years at a squash gym in Maastricht, the Netherlands. After starting to build again with LEGO a few years ago, Berthil decided to recreate the the gym and the lovely building that it’s housed in. Built from 11,000 LEGO bricks, Berthil tells us that he spent about 400 hours designing and building this highly detailed LEGO model — a creation that celebrates the place full of “fun and wonderful people.”

The LEGO version of the Squash Centrum includes all the details of the real thing, from solar panels and a little garden on the roof to men’s and women’s locker rooms (complete with sauna) and the glass-enclosed squash court itself. Whether you love squash or not, this is an incredibly detailed creation worth poring over for lots of fun little scenes.

See more photos of this amazingly detailed building

LEGO Architecture 21029 Buckingham Palace [Review]

Summer 2016 sees two additions to the LEGO Architecture range — Washington DC’s Capitol Building and London’s Buckingham Palace. Here’s the Brothers Brick’s look at LEGO’s version of a very rich old lady’s house…

Click here to read our verdict on this new set

Incredible LEGO Eiffel Tower stands over four feet tall

LEGO creations always have a story. Sometimes, when we find things online, the builder gives a very brief story; sometimes, we find something amazing, and do an interview so we can bring you a bigger story. And then sometimes, like this beautiful Eiffel Tower by Rafal Piasek, the builder gives us the whole story and takes us on a journey.

Click to read more!

Through the Siq to the hidden Nabatean city of Petra

As I wrote in introducing ArzLan’s LEGO Petra, I spent the summer of 1994 on an archaeological dig in Jordan, and visited Petra for one memorable weekend. Both Petra and Jordan as a whole remain one of the highlights of my life. Letranger Absurde has built a lovely microscale version of Al-Khazneh, the “Treasury” (actually an empty tomb), that greets each visitor to Petra as they emerge from the winding gorge called the Siq.

My one critique of this excellent LEGO model is that the sandstone geology of Petra is nearly as spectacular as the many structures carved into the rock face. Although building a detailed tomb using varying shades of tan and red might not have been achievable, plain brown LEGO for the surrounding rocks seems like a lost opportunity.

Al-Khazneh is, of course best known as the entrance to the fictional, trap-filled obstacle course leading to the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The facade is the most spectacular thing about the tomb — the interior is just an empty square chamber, though the acoustics are great for singing.

When you gotta go, you gotta LE-GO

I suppose derjoe has just created another public space like a museum, library or cafe. But this is the first time that I’ve seen public toilets used as the theme for a LEGO ‘playset’. The builder has cleverly captured some of the common findings in a male public toilet block, such as urinals (and some pee ewwww), wash basin, toilet brushes, toilet rolls, and cisterns complete with their seats left up!

The playset is hinged and opens out to allow the paper towel dispenser and waste bin to be revealed. Thankfully the stalls all have their door closed in this view and the brown frog is not visible, although I find the fact that the toilet paper is placed the wrong way much more upsetting.

Overall, a quirky, fun build and I really like the colour scheme used, although it does not reflect the average public toilet here here in the UK. Also, for us females, a long queue of minifigures patiently waiting while the male toilets are empty would seem about right.

Modern architecture gets prettier and prettier (and smaller)

Paul Wellington‘s latest microscale building uses the still relatively new Mixel joint piece to create a fabulous pattern effect. Sometimes I think repeated elements like this can be overdone in microscale buildings — cool techniques but failing to capture the feel of real world architecture. That’s not the case here. I could totally see Paul’s building sitting downtown in any modern city.

Of course, Paul doesn’t need this building to show up in your city. He’s got a LEGO one all of his own that he’s been adding to over time. I’d heartily recommend a visit to his photostream for lots of pictures of his brick-built metropolis — current piece count sitting at around 19,000 parts!

Silly readers, bookshelves are for displaying LEGO!

Some builders go years without sharing any of their builds online, but the LEGO creations can be worth the wait. We featured a lovely LEGO Tardis by Alan McMorran way back in 2008 (and I had the pleasure of meeting Alan in person at BrickCon the next year). Alan is back with a fantastic bridge that spans shelves at two different levels in his study.

Alan tells me that the “Constantine Bridge” was inspired by the old London Bridge and the Ponte Vecchio in Venice — houses and their residents crowding the arch.

Click to see more of this great integration of LEGO and interior design

Information superhighway

Originally, the so-called “information superhighway” was a metaphor. Information would still be flowing along telecom trunk lines, just like it had before. The amount of info available through those same old lines was the real story of the early 1990s. But fast forward a few decades, to a future imagined by Carter Baldwin and Simon Liu: there’s so much information that a highway can barely contain it. Miles and miles of high-speed cable, just below the actual roadway. I’m not sure what’s going on in the wild undergrowth beneath the infrastructure, but that doesn’t interest me nearly as much as the infrastructure itself. The tubes! The girders!

Gateway to LEGO brick wall building

Tim Schwalfenberg’s latest build, Wizard’s Gate, is a masterclass in both rock work and brick wall building. There are a lot of lovely techniques packed in to really make this model top class. In particular, the wall portion of the gate uses a technique that requires some off-setting techniques using the headlight brick and some patience with clips and tiles, but the finished look is really fantastic.

Tim has provided a breakdown of the technique used to create the brick wall effect. As Tim explains, “The wall is constructed using headlight bricks to achieve a half plate vertical offset and then alternating clips on 1×2 tiles to form the exterior wall It’s similar to many of legostrator’s awesome techniques.”

A brand new LEGO brand store

If you’re interested in LEGO, you’ve got to know everything about toy stores in your town or city. But Adeel Zubair knows about toy stores a lot more than any of us; he knew to build the perfect one.

Not only is this an outstanding modular building with an exterior worth being placed in one lane with the legendary Green Grocer, but also a masterpiece of store marketing — just have a look at what is hidden inside!

Here are the lovely wooden duck and the lovely green dragon on the first floor, while the ground floor is all about shelves full of the newest sets. And don’t forget to check out the awesome Pick-A-Brick wall! Many more pictures are in the album on Flickr!

Gini’s Home Electrical Store is now open on BrickHills Avenue

It is the early 1960s and we are going for a stroll down BrickHills Avenue with builder Andrew Tate. Andrew has created a lovely scene with Art Deco-inspired architecture centering on Gini’s home electrical store on the corner. There is definitely evidence of the source of inspiration being a movie theater, and Andrew mentions the Warner Beverly Hills theater and Sunset Boulevard theatre at Disney Studios in his own description.

This build is not just a façade, as Andrew has also designed some interior views. The image below is clearly from Gini’s home electrical store. It looks to be a source for colourful refrigerators, washing machines and expensive cookers — more than enough to meet the desires of a mini-housewife!