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.

Blue Mosque

Blue Mosque has been among the most important landmarks in Istanbul ever since it was built in the 17th century. Turkish builder Artizan skillfully captures the details of the mosque in microscale. The mosque’s many domes and semi-domes are smoothly crafted into LEGO form. The balconies and spires on the minarets are also perfectly represented.

Blue Mosque

Artizan also built the Hagia Sophia and you can see both buildings side by side on his Flickr stream. Also check out his digital rendering of the Ortaköy Mosque!

Fortress city is a desert jewel

Greg Dlx brings us a fabulous desert city, with a beautiful set of gates in an impressive wall. The color scheme catches the eye, but it’s the details evoking the architecture of the Middle East which encourage you to look closer. The sand dunes created with curved tan pieces are also a lovely touch.

Gates of Petraea - Front - Right

When opened, the gates allow access to a nicely-built section of the city itself. I like the way the stables and other buildings follow the curve of the main wall.

Gates of Petraea - Back

After our recent post mentioning a relative lack of Islamic-style architecture in LEGO, this answers the brief. Let’s see even more of this kind of building please.

Old-school classroom is a classy build

Time for a building lesson from LegoJalex. His 80s-era school classroom model is just fantastic. From the blackboard, through the TV on a trolley, to the overhead projector and pull-down screen – the details are immediately recognisable to anyone who went to school before the digital age.

Classroom

The pictures on the walls, the bags with books, and the caps hanging on chair backs – these all create the impression of a peaceful classroom about to be invaded by noisy kids fresh from the playground break. Check out some of the nice little building touches too – the horns as pieces of chalk, and the grille tiles for bunched up curtains. Beautiful stuff.

Tiny Dortmund is a German gem

Michael Jasper has built an excellent microscale model of his home town Dortmund in a similar style to the new LEGO Cities Architecture range.

Dortmund

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the city itself, you can admire the quality of these tiny creations. The church is a fantastic build for so few bricks, and the coal mine is a lovely little model. But the undoubted star of the show is the Borussia Dortmund stadium where clever parts use delivers an impressive level of detail. The use of “cheesegrater slopes” set at an angle to provide the stadium walls is a particular stroke of genius.

The unrivaled beauty of Islamic architecture in LEGO

I can’t believe it’s been more than six years since we’ve blogged a LEGO mosque. The intricate, geometric designs of Islamic architecture all over the the world — from Córdoba to Jakarta — would seem to lend itself particularly well to LEGO. This wonderful structure by brickbink represents a section of a mosque, with a minaret in which the muezzin is calling a diverse group of people to worship.

The mosque

Only a handful in the past ten years? It seems to me like the world needs more LEGO mosques.

A vibrant Greek city on the sea

The annual Kockice Brickstory Contest attracted a lot of talented builders this year including jaapxaap’s Hanging Gardens of Babylon that we posted on Wednesday, but Simon Schweyer‘s Greek Polis is the most massive entry I’ve seen so far.

A Classical Greek Polis

There is so much to take in! Four unique homes, an amphitheater filled with tiny citizens, a vineyard, a goat herder, a temple, an Oracle inspired by the one in Delphi, and even a man-powered war galley.

A Classical Greek Polis (Herder) A Classical Greek Polis (Trireme)

You can check out even more details on Flickr.

Perfect home for a melancholy samurai

Some beautifully sinister and gloomy Japanese-style micro architecture on display from Tim Schwalfenberg. With it’s moody black and silver color scheme and wonderful levels of detail, this fortress could be a piece of concept art from 47 Ronin. (And that’s intended as a compliment – although the film as a whole might not have lived up to expectation, it looked very pretty indeed).

Forbidden Fortress

The fortress walls are impressively detailed and the curved roof is an obvious highlight, but it’s the neat little bridge and the base which add the finishing touches of brilliance. This could be the first set in a new LEGO theme of Fantasy Architecture. (If LEGO were to launch such a line they could literally take all my money. All of it.)

A wonder of the ancient world

Sometimes a unique color palette really makes a LEGO creation stand out. That is exactly what’s happened with jaapxaap‘s most recent build. And considering that scholars disagree on where and when the Hanging Gardens were built (and if they ever actually existed in the first place), no one can argue that the famous gardens weren’t surrounded by beautiful tile work in blues, white, and gold. My favorite details in this stunning build are the bas-relief animals sculpted into the walls and the SNOT (studs not on top) lintels.

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Going Dutch

Some great Dutch architecture modelling here from Brickbink. This scene is a near-perfect recreation of an Amsterdam street; all it needs is a canal and it would be spot-on.

A4

The color blocking of the buildings and the windows are excellent, and the brickwork around the gable-end roofs really catches the eye. As ever though, it’s the details which make a model pop, and there’s a feast of them on display here. The piano lifters are the obvious stars of the show, but I love the little basement windows at street level, and the crate of bric-a-brac is a nice touch. I’m assuming the build is set around Konigsdag – “King’s Day” – when the Dutch sell their second-hand goods out in the street in front of their homes.

40 Wall St built with LEGO trumps the real thing

Following on from his recent adventures in London at the Houses of Parliament,  Rocco Buttliere is back on the other side of the ‘pond’.  Rocco’s latest build in his 1:650 Architecture series is 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.

Rocco tells us that 40 Wall St is a 927ft, 70 storey skyscraper, completed in 1930.  It held the title of World’s Tallest building for less than a month before the Chrysler Building took the title (albeit after a bit of arguing). The building was designed by lead architect H. Craig Severance in collaboration with associate architect, Yasuo Matsui.

The view of the other side of 40 Wall Street shows the number of setbacks required to form the building. Rocco tells us, “The dramatic massing due to the density of setbacks on the major block of 40 Wall St, is a result of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. This ordinance required the footprint mass of the building to diminish accordingly as the height of the building increased.”  In other words, as the skyscraper goes up, it needs to get smaller – seems like a good idea to me too…

Apparently this creation had been on hold until LEGO Architecture Venice 21026 was released as it provided the sand green quadruple convex slope which tops the gabled roof. Did you spot the screwdriver at the top?

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it

Not all LEGO creations are built with the goal of becoming world-famous masterpieces. Some models are created simply to share a couple of neat building techniques. This is one special category where you can come across some particularly brilliant exhibits, which have nothing to do with huge dioramas or horribly complicated mechanisms, but which still demand your attention. And Jonas Wide‘s Oleander house is exactly that kind of build.

Oleander house

I imagine most of us have tried building a shabby brick wall at least once. About 10 years ago it was a fairly difficult task. But with the arrival of dark red plates and bricks with masonry patterns, even a beginner can now manage some authentic-looking walls for their town or fortress. But Jonas throws some multi-layered techniques into the mix, to make it look as if the wall gradually deteriorated over the years. Simply beautiful, isn’t it?

A brick-built home: incredible LEGO modern kitchen

Tim Schwalfenberg is trying to fool us with this kitchen photograph, which appears to be a gorgeous modern kitchen in an upscale home decor magazine. Look closely, though, and you’ll notice that it is completely LEGO. There are lots of great details here, but I like the train wheels for barstool cushions, and the tiled backsplash, which just looks perfectly realistic.

What's Cooking?

And if you enjoy large-scale modern home interiors made of LEGO, then you’ll definitely want to check out Littlehaulic’s builds:

Modern kitchen and dining room
Modern bedroom and den
Full beach house interior