Tag Archives: Chinese

Take a stroll down a stunning brick-built street

For a Western audience, this collection of buildings by 磊耿 is a striking break from the more familiar architecture usually seen in a LEGO street scene, with a wonderful variety of styles. But regardless of where you’re from, you’re bound to be impressed by the sheer quality of the building work on display. Pagoda roofs vie with castle spires for attention, and “big” certainly doesn’t mean bland, with an impressive depth of texture and interesting colour schemes across all the structures.

See more images of these beautiful buildings

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One stop fish shop

This multi-storey LEGO fish market built by Glaz Pimpur is a microcosm of bustling city life. It’s also one of those builds that rewards a top to bottom scan, with each level offering up its own special treat.

Starting at street level we get to see all manner of produce being brought to market. Is that a shark in the back of that truck! Above the gates there’s some nifty part usage, with trans orange boulders doubling as lanterns. Carry on up the façade and it’s time to show off some excellent typography work in the form of the brick-built fish Kanji. Just when you think its done, the model reveals a final rooftop surprise: an authentic temple, where you can finish your shopping trip off with some tai chi practice.

Riding the golden dragon

Capturing all the flourishes of traditional Chinese aesthetic style, Space Brick’s Shrine of the Golden Dragon is another effortlessly elegant build. Like his ramen and sushi bar, he’s once again tapped into his subject and adjusted his building techniques to match. The eponymous dragon is a single sweeping curve, detailed with simple gold studs to replicate scales. The base is a thing of beauty too, with a backdrop of wonderfully stylised clouds. It’s not just a great LEGO model it’s a marvellous ornament too.

Take a cable car to the clouds

One of the things I love about Alan Boar’s LEGO creations is the amount of time he takes to research his subjects. In this case it’s the Taikoo Ropeway, an early cable car system built in 1891 to link Hong Kong’s Taikoo Dockyard to the Taikoo Sugar Refinery. The finished diorama, built in collaboration with his wife and son, is rendered in an aesthetic reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting. Designed in monochrome, the Mount Parker setting is wonderfully accented with stylised brick clouds. In front of the clouds, a grey building frames the predominately white ropeway scene, helping to highlight a host of fascinating features.

Aiwan Ting Pavilion is eye-pleasing, both inside and out

When it comes to building historic Chinese architecture from LEGO bricks, it can prove challenging to capture the sweeping curves of rooftops and ornate details. While we’ve seen builders employ a variety of techniques for this, with his model of the Aiwan Ting Pavilion, Chinese builder Smoker Nie has managed to pull off both the shape and the details in an especially eye-pleasing manner. Aiwan Pavilion is located on Mount Yuelu in the Chinese province of Hunan.

Smoker’s building is an excellent likeness, both inside and out. According to the builder, 12350 LEGO bricks were used in its construction.

Click to see more of this LEGO Aiwan Pavilion

Making a pig of himself

Zhu Bajie is one of the Monkey God’s fellow travellers in the classic tale Journey To The West. Western TV viewers might know him better as ‘Pigsy’ from the late-70s adaptation. However, familiarity with the source material isn’t required to appreciate this amazing LEGO version of the porcine hero by Kingmarshy. Wonderfully sculpted from a mix of Technic, Bionicle, and regular system bricks, this is a masterpiece of character building. The face is excellent, as is the headdress, but it’s the lines of the robe, with its white trim gaping around the bulging stomach, which really caught my eye. It’s also nice to see this sort of character engaged in a peaceful activity like feasting rather than set up in a more martial pose. The accompanying furniture is perfect — helping create the period feel, but not distracting attention from the main character himself.