Posted by
Dan
at
9:20 PM
| Name of Model: Ancient Lady's Museum |
| Created by: marcosbessa |
| Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45092539@N02/sets/72157624545840324/with/4812544383/ & the same photos can also be found on Brickshelf: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=438981 |
Details:   Premiered at this year's Arte em Peças event, this gorgeous show-stopper is actually in scale with the Cafe Corner and ready for minifigures. It's not truly to the Cafe Corner standard, though, since the back is wide open. Of course, if the back wasn't open, we wouldn't be able to see the fantastic interior work. Highlights include leathery couches, mosaic floor patterns, a pair of grand spiral staircases, a variety of minifigures on display, detailed curtains built upside-down (in dark red!), and ornate window decorations on the outside. You'll need to use the "View All Sizes" feature on flickr to zoom in and see the original photo size in order to see some of the details.
You can also see a set of Work-In-Progress (WIP) photos of this model on flickr. One of the highlights is a look inside the column technique.
Additionally, the builder is now selling instructions for LEGO Digital Designer for another model I've featured from him:
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| This is Saturday's model of the day |
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Posted by
Dan
at
11:38 PM
| Name of Model: Shell station and tanker. Comments, questions e-mail stevenasbury-at-comcast.net |
| Created by: s-asbury |
| Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=121105 |
Details:  Over the years, LEGO has had several licensing deals (and sets based on them) with the Shell oil company. Inevitably, though, even when they did experiment with minifig-scale gas stations, nothing really met the level of complexity that we like to see in our custom built town layouts. Perhaps that's intentional - after all, once they give you the special elements, stickers, and printed parts specific to the Shell brand, nothing's stopping you from adding other parts from your own collection to expand the kit. Since this is LEGO we're talking about (and some of these kits were sold cheaply at gas stations as promotional items), that may have been their plan all along.
This model is a good combination of official Shell parts, a great gas station design, and custom decal work. The rare parts don't end with the Shell-specific elements, though. The refueling truck here makes use of the chrome elements from a 4 Juniors Tanker Truck set (which isn't exactly a set most people are interested in keeping around, thanks to the "juniorized" nature of the larger parts in it).
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Posted by
Dan
at
1:22 AM
| Name of Model: Burberry™ store |
| Created by: Jared Chan |
| Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaredchan/sets/72157624216703327/ |
Details:  Recently featured on Brick Town Talk (which you should be reading in addition to this blog anyway), this Burberry store stands out as a high-water mark amongst recent highlights in the Cafe Corner standard of modular building (I post those highlights over at Brick Town Talk instead of here at LMOTD, but I did feature another model by the same builder this past March). Some of my favorite bits here: The Grand Emporium's awning technique recast in gold using parts from the Battle of Alamut, the use of a wheel and a dish for a unique gold-ish flourish at the top, and a group of bracket-plate-tile testures on the second floor (this actually adds up to the width of a normal brick and gives you that vertical stripe effect). I'm also a big fan of the studs that face toward the front of the building - the added texture looks great, and it's a feature that tile-crazed LEGO fans tend to forget actually looks pretty good in many contexts. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: Brookings Hall |
| Created by: Nannan Z. |
| Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nannanz/4621429701/ |
Details:  As part of a series of gifts to people who work for his alma mater, Nannan Z. created this microscale rendition of Brookings Hall, a distinctive structure on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. While this is a rather simple model by construction, the colors used make it a challenging thing to try building - the main color here is that new color that only appears in the Prince of Persia kits so far. Since only 14 parts have ever been sold in that color, it can be quite a challenge to figure out how to get the desired shape. Throw in two more fairly rare colors - sand green for the roof and dark tan for the ground - and suddenly this becomes a bit more challenging to try to create. Fortunately, the end result is a fairly accurate likeness.
If you look a few photos back in Nannan's flickr photostream, you can see the other four photos of this model and also take a look at some of the other models he has recently made as teacher gifts (most of which make great use of custom engraving to personalize LEGO bricks). |
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: Airport. MOC includes many LED lights and three Minimotor. Motors are for-Baggage Conveyor, Radar and Helicopter rotors. |
| Created by: pjotr |
| Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=431628 |
Details:  This airport attempts to do it all. Planes, a control tower, a hangar, a gate with a ramp to connect to planes, a working baggage conveyor and even a parking garage. Some custom LEDs and tape (for the baggage conveyor) were used, but otherwise all the detailing is done with LEGO. Completely built airports are rare due to the amount of space they take up and the amount of parts required (getting the look and feel right can be difficult, and attempting to build planes and runways with a proper sense of scale is nearly impossible). This particular model seems to have met the lofty challenge of doing an airport justice. There are plenty of detail photos if you want to see how this was done - there are a few fairly surprising details and techniques hiding in the subfolders. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
12:02 AM
| Name of Model: Underground station based on the Stortinget station in Oslo |
| Created by: matija |
| Found at: http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=427352 |
Details:
 This is a fairly surprising model. At first glance, you can't really tell what's going on. It's a reasonably realistic model of a subway station. Except that it's not just an underground station - it's actually lit up, and the train itself is a functional 9V train. It looks like the lights are actually bright enough that no other lights were used for these photos (needless to say, I'm assuming that these are not LEGO lights and are actually just wedged into LEGO pieces, by either modification of the lights, of the bricks, or both). Of the five photos here, two are inspiration photos that show how close of a likeness this is to the original. Even the signs and advertisements are replicated in LEGO form. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: Fallingwater |
| Created by: Matija Grguric |
| Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matijagrguric/sets/72157623778661188/ |
Details:
 A while back (we didn't mention it because we don't feel comfortable recommending it due to the extremely high price per part ratio), LEGO released an official Fallingwater kit that is very faithful to the original structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The trouble with the official sets in the Architecture theme and other kits that build landmarks (such as the Taj Mahal, which is currently $50 off) is that the limits of currently available parts and acceptable pricing ensure that no matter what the LEGO company can sell in a kit, it'll be possible for a fan to do a better job with the same source material. In this case, we see Fallingwater rendered at a 1:40 scale (roughly minifig scale, although minifig dimensions are blurry enough to not really fit any scale exactly) instead of the microscale of the original kit. Also interesting about this model is that this one is clearly in a wintery season - note the spindly, leafless trees and the dark icy water.
In the interest of being thorough and giving you all of the display and construction details, I'm stealing the description of this model that appears with most of the photos:
Building info:
Fallingwater, also known as the Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. Residence, is a house designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1934 in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. The house was built partly over a waterfall in Bear Run at Rural Route 1 in the Mill Run section of Stewart Township, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Mountains. For the rest of the information regarding the house please visit Wikipedia.
Project:
I've had thoughts about this project since I've built Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. I finally made up my mind in September 2009. when I began planning and working on some early designs. Scale of the building is minifig, or approximate 1:40. One of the issues was how to make the stone walls of the building. The result here is made out of 4 different shades of grey (old grey and bley). Other was the terrain and vegetation. In the end I decided to make it in winter atmosphere. Snow is something I always enjoy, and I was always more of a winter type of person, so here it is - my first snowy MOC. :)
Building process spread over total of almost 7 months, and the structure is made out of more than 15000 bricks (just an approximate guess). It is placed on 6 48*48 baseplates, and measures 115 x 80 x 50 cm. It weights more than 20 kg. This MOC will be displayed in Technical Museum in Zagreb on "Kockice EXPO 2010", in May and June this year.
I would like to thank dear Klementina for her help and support during the rough times - multiple structure collapses. ;) Check it out at the links above and/or at the museum in Zagreb in the coming months - this is an excellent model.
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: Brick-City Waterfront 3.0 |
| Created by: Tim M. |
| Found at: http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/156687 |
Details:
 We've previously blogged about Shannonia, TwinLUG Micropolis and LowLug Micropolis. There are, of course, plenty of other microscale cities out there (and there's nothing stopping you from building your own). This one is interesting in how it attempts to show part of the countryside along with the the small city. A landscaped cliff with rocks, a castle, and a small cave stands out, as does the water made entirely out of trans-dark-blue 2x2 bricks. The bridge leading out to where another waterfront city could be build is a clever touch too. Did I mention that there's also a city here with lots of microscale goodness? |
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: MC Daly Building |
| Created by: Bisonfuehrer |
| Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bisonfuehrer/4401683924/ |
Details:
 Another micropolis masterpiece. While using translucent parts isn't exactly a new technique, it's used to great effect here. The trans-black color works really well with the black plates. If you study this design closely, you'll see that there are a few places that don't line up quite the way you'd expect. Those details are achieved by using the flat side of log bricks - since those are a little narrower than normal bricks at the ends, they can be used to add a bit more texture. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
12:25 AM
| Name of Model: Hermes Store |
| Created by: Jared Chan |
| Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaredchan/sets/72157623685539880/ |
Details:
 At one point, there was a rumor that the next Cafe Corner style set would be sand blue. It's a shame that we didn't get a new kit in that color, but this model would be hard to top even if Jamie Berard (the designer of Cafe Corner, Green Grocer, and Grand Emporium) did pursue that color in an official set. While this whole model is fantastic, some highlights include the horse statue, the clothing racks, and the stunning architecture. The corner in particular is an interesting trick - instead of putting a full edge on the building with an angled doorway and windows, we get a column that just rounds things off. I'm pretty sure the texture there is achieved by use of click hinge bricks facing opposite directions. Corrected by a reader Wednesday morning: This effect is built sideways in two different directions - those tiles are actually attached to 1x2 slopes, and we're seeing the sloped surface face outward. A clever and very easy solution!
This is just one part of a full street created by this one builder. You can see photos of all his modular buildings on flickr. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: LIU - Napu Art Museum |
| Created by: Emperor Ludgonious |
| Found at: http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/186983 |
Details:
 There are quite a few interesting challenges one can take when constructing a large building out of LEGO parts. You could try making it in Space with unusual size, with certain types of artwork or architectural details...the possibilities are endless. In this case, we have a large, well-designed art museum in Space. Naturally, there are plenty of interior photos showing the various pieces of "artwork" that have been carefully constructed with little LEGO pieces. You can guess from the photos how to assemble the various works, but most of them aren't terribly sturdy - they're just laid into place to get the right image to appear. There are some other interesting techniques to pick up here as well - get a look at the front railings, the picture lights, the sideways floors (in most of the photos you can see smooth floors that are actually the sides of bricks) with benches built into them, and the zany sculptures. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
4:00 AM
| Name of Model: Shannonia |
| Created by: Shannon Young |
| Found at: http://www.mocpages.com/folder.php/16332 |
Details:
 Microscale cities these days tend to be of the micropolis variety. It makes sense, really - it's a large, easy to manage standard that is great for building city blocks, and it's the only way I've seen to manage a collaborative microscale layout. Before micropolis, though, there were still plenty of people building microscale cities. One that attracted a bit of attention was Shannonia, a sprawling resort town. Since there are a large amount of photos available of the various incarnations of Shannonia available at the links above, I will leave it at that. |
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Posted by
Dan
at
2:34 PM
 Official information about the new Grand Emporium kit (which had briefly appeared on the Shop at Home website without any real announcement last week) has been scarce. International prices are still hard to pin down, and we still have no idea when the official release dates are. Strangely, though, in spite of the lack of information or fanfare (don't they know how excited we are about this kit?) the kit has surfaced for sale at LEGO Brand Retail locations in the UK. Brick Street over at Brick Town Talk was able to buy the kit at the Milton Keynes location for £139.99. He's been building the kit and reviewing it online as he builds it. There are tons of interesting details just in the box art he posted, and the pictures of the set's insides are even better! My search for 10211 (the Grand Emporium's set number) seems to be the best way to pull up all of the review posts at once.
I can't wait to get my hands on this one for myself - it looks like a fitting replacement for the original Cafe Corner kit (this is now the only corner building available from LEGO in this scale). The few official photos that were available briefly earlier this week can now be found at Brickset. With any luck, LEGO will give this the official big announcement it deserves soon. |
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