Town Hall

Name of Model: Town Hall built in 2 weeks for 1000steine event August 24th - 26th, 2007

Created by: LEGO® designer Jamie Berard Blog:http://sideshowjamie.livejournal.com/ Brickshelf: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?m=SideShowJamie

Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=272790

Details: I've been thrilled to see over the past few months how much involvement LEGO® designer Jamie Berard has had with fans. He has become famous recently for designing popular sets like the Café Corner, but he also has made numerous appearances at events and been interviewed by a number of publications. Today's model is a town hall that is compatible with the Cafe Corner modular building standard. It was built over two weeks in 2007. Of course, some of the details point out advantages of working for the company - check out the windows made from hard-to-find garage door components. Also visible in that photo are some studs-not-on-top details using both bricks and a large amount of the 1x1 cheese slope pieces - and if you take a close look at the window frame, you'll notice that that's mostly done with studs facing outward instead of upward too. Other techniques, though, explain why they don't make sets like this. For one thing, there's the use of transition brown colors to get a realistic wood tone on the outside of the building (in 2003, the LEGO® company decided to change the color brown from the traditional shade to a new shade called "red-brown" or reddish brown. The newer color is molded in a different way that took a while to perfect - and in the interests of keeping costs down, LEGO decided to release thousands of brown pieces with small differences in shading. Some people are upset about this for obvious reasons, but using these pieces together with the older brown pieces and the final version of the new red-brown color does give a nice wooden effect). For another, this is enormous (15 inch / 48 stud square baseplate) and would be cost prohibitive. The columns are an excellent touch, and don't miss the gargoyle (an owl and a pair of biscuits in front of two wheel wells) or the bell (a "Mayan" coin, 1x2 tiles, and inverted 2x2 dish, some black studs-not-on-top pieces and two black rounded elements) either. My personal favorite technique, though, has to be the trick for the second-floor balcony overlooking the meeting room. It looks like a few tiles are extending the floor outward a little bit, and two of the round fence piece's post are latched onto by space robot arms.