Tag Archives: Buildings

LEGO cyberpunk creation towers above everything – including its creator!

Few collaborative LEGO builds can surely claim to have the reach that the New Hashima project has had. It’s seen offshoots pop up all over the world, and builders are still adding to it almost two years after it started. Blake Foster is the latest to construct another cyberpunk edifice – and quite a sizable one, at that! Blake tells us that Hashimacorp Tower took almost 18 months to complete, including a 20-hour (!) long building session. That’s commitment! And I think it warrants a closer look, don’t you?

Hashimacorp Tower

Come and take a tour of this terrific tower!

Careful! Cool colours can conceal conniving crazies...

Do not adjust your set, reader: this LEGO build really is this colour! It’s not the result of a messed up RGB balance, but the work of LEGO Masters alum Jaap Bijl! At first glance, it’s a house full of whimsy: slightly cartoony proportions, those bright colours, and a fantastic technique for the roof. Who would’ve thought to use chicken drumsticks as tiles? Brilliant! But there’s a sinister side here too, as evidenced by the ominous red light emanating from inside. Surely such a colourful abode can’t hide anything nefarious inside, right? It’s probably fine to stay the night. All the same, I’ll let you go in first. No really, after you, please. I’ll be right behind you, promise…

Mansion of Mysterious Mornings

Tall towers are all well and good – as long as you don’t mind stairs

No-one likes a show-off. Now I’m not accusing Peter Botcher of being one – although his builds are certainly worth bragging about. But the owner of this enormous LEGO tower? That’s a different story! At the bottom, you’ve got two medieval small businesses: one a bakery, the other a small kiosk. I imagine the owners have to work really hard to get customers. But an alchemist has moved into town, and built their potion shop to tower over the others. What a nerve! I suspect it may backfire on them, though. Elevators won’t be invented for another few hundred years, and going up all those stairs may put off all but the most athletic of clientele…

Taking the micro out of microscale

This here is a microscale LEGO CN Tower, as built by Flickr user q_159. Now microscale builds are usually small, right? It is in the name after all. And this is built to a miniscule 1:400 scale, which makes the cars at its base barely two studs long. But the thing you need to remember about the CN Tower is that it’s really frickin’ tall – over half a kilometre. And as a result, this tiny LEGO model is not that tiny at all, clocking in at 3,000 pieces and nearly 1.4 m (four-and-a-half feet)! Small but mighty, indeed.

CN Tower 2

An enthralling exercise in eccentric edifice excellence

There are many fantastic LEGO architects out there – just look through our archives. But if you like your structures a little more unconventional, then there are few better at that than Pan Noda. What I love the most about their buildings isn’t their odd designs, fascinating as they are. It’s how they deploy repeating motifs and detailed textures to create something as visually interesting up close as it is as a whole! In this instance, that involves the undersides of 1×1 clips, alternating horizontal and vertical portions of the wall, and a whole lotta cheese slopes. That extends beyond the building and into the base as well, which replicates the hexagonal shape of the tower. Finally, the climbing trees and vines add the perfect splash of colour to break things up even further!

Silence Portal

900 years to wear down a temple, 7 days to build it out of LEGO

The proficiency of LEGO builders never ceases to amaze me. Timothy Shortell (AKA Classical Bricks) tells a story of coming across a photo of the Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia. A week goes by, and boom – we get this amazing model at the end of it. That’s no time at all! Just the careful positioning of the roof tiles for that jungle-weathered temple look must have taken a good while. In fact, all the weathering is very well judged, and the tree roots winding their way down to the ground – very nicely done. It’s almost unfair how quickly this was all achieved. When I build for a week, I’m lucky if I’ve even got a half-finished model at the end of it, let alone one as good as this!

Ta Prohm Temple

This LEGO tower evokes mad scientists, crazy experiments, and, er, video games

One of the great things about art (and yes, LEGO building is an art form!) is that people can draw on their own experiences and environments to find new meaning in a creation. Illia Zubashev came up with an in-depth backstory to this teetering tower. Apparently it’s the abode of a maverick scientist and inventor, which should come as no surprise – I mean, just look at it! As interesting as the description is, though, I didn’t register any of that when I first saw this. What popped into my head was the video game Sable. It’s completely unrelated, but it just has the same sort of vibe. So sorry I didn’t heed your fascinating description, Illia. At least I can appreciate what a good build this is!

Storm Tower

Take a country break in this art-nouveau villa

So you’ve been into town, you’ve visited the LEGO bank that Eero Okkonen built, and now you feel like you need a bit of a break from the hustle and bustle of city life. Luckily, Eero has you sorted for accommodation there too! Why not head down to Villa Mauski for a short stay? It’s just as art-nouveau, but with all the peace and quiet the Nordic forests do so well. You don’t even need to chop wood for the fire, the wood shelter is already full of 1×4 arch pieces for that!

Villa Mauski

Round the back, you’ve got a slice of forest to call your own in case you do need more wood. But those trees are so pretty, it would seema waste to chop them down! There are a lot of good uses of the so-called macaroni tube here. As in Eero’s previous architectural build, they’re used as a motif on the villa’s archway, but they’re also in the smoke and in the trees. You know, maybe just a short stay is not long enough to spend in Villa Mauski!

Villa Mauski

A brick-built lesson in Finnish architecture

You probably know Finland for a few things: sauna, northern lights, rally drivers, and Eero Okkonen. What you might not know is its propensity for excellent art nouveau architecture. And what better way to show that than with Eero’s fantastic, and enormous, model dubbed the Tampereen Pankki! Eero might be better known for his character models, but he’s clearly a dab hand at LEGO architecture too. This doesn’t depict a specific building, rather it’s an amalgamation of a few different bank buildings in Eero’s hometown of Tampere (hence Tampereen Pankki = Bank of Tampere). See, you’re even learning some Finnish thanks to this build!

Tampereen Pankki

Click to see inside!

Onomatopeia... Or is it?

This charming abode by Daniel Barwegen is full of mystery. It’s titled “Onomatopeya”, a facsimile of a word that refers to words that imitate sounds (think “meow” or “atchoo”). But with the windmill and lack of fauna, this build seems to evoke the lack of noises, not noise words. That begs the question of why there isn’t anyone here? The little flying utility vehicle parked outside suggests we’re in the future, and the blue sky and windmill again make me think it’s a utopian rather than dystopian vision. But then again, it’s so overgrown! If someone does live here they’re no gardener… I dunno. In fact, just about the only thing I do know is that the Duplo window fits this place so well I almost didn’t recognize it.

Onomatopeya

Is a LEGO builder’s work – or a church – ever truly finished?

I used to live down the road from a cathedral, and the one thing I have noticed about them and churches is that more often than not, they seem to always have scaffolding up somewhere for restoration work. This is based purely on anecdotal evidence of course, but I will use Margrabia Mokotowski‘s beautiful LEGO church as another datapoint to support this dubious claim! Inspired by a real church in Margrabia’s native Poland, it wouldn’t look out of place as the centerpiece of a medieval township, even with the heavy weathering in evidence with some nice texturing. The ever-present scaffolding, though, belies its true setting in a modern-day LEGO city. It’s funny how a few minifigures and safety barriers can change the context of a whole build by a few hundred years!

Church_2

Visions of a dystopian flat-pack future

If the first thing that pops into your mind when thinking of dystopian futures is flat-pack furniture, well, you must be Cecilie Fritzvold. She decided to bring a touch of Scandinavian flair to the colossal cyberpunk city of New Hashima. You’d be forgiven for thinkin that Swedish minimalism and might not mesh that well with the often gritty cyberpunk aesthetic, but the concept works remarkably well. Little touches like the Japanese signage and neon decor make it look right at home.

Ikea at New Hashima