Details: ArtAsiaPacific and People's Architecture have teamed up for Building Asia Brick By Brick, a series of presentations of original architectural LEGO models. The models are currently on a tour of sorts. Click here for dates and locations of the presentation. The models are being exhibited and soon will be auctioned to raise awareness about architectural presentation in Asia.
To make designing the buildings a bit more of a challenge, the creators of the models have been primarily limited to standard white LEGO Bricks.
Today's pick from this exhibit is this periscope sculpture - which has been designed to make people think about the viewing process from both a child's perspective and an adult's perspective. You can judge for yourself how effective it is at that, but you have to admit that it's one heck of a sculpture. I love how this one combines more architectural elements (The boxier upper section and arch) and more abstract elements (the whimsical lower section). Some cheating was used here for lighting and the periscope's mirrors (at least, I think that they're cheating there - there's always that off chance that DUPLO mirrors are being used there, and I suppose those could be LEGO lights too...). This model can currently be seen in Shanghai, and it will be there (along with the rest of the Building Asia Brick By Brick presentation) through August 4th. The exhibit will be on display in Beijing from August 16th to September 1st, Shanghai from September 6th to the 9th, and Chengdu from the 13th to the 25th.
Details: This 'bot is a pretty clever simplification of the "walker" format. Only one motor is used - a series of levers makes the rest of the motion work. The main advantage of this is that it frees up additional motors to be used for other tasks. Another interesting this about this walker is the way that the beams and motors make this something you could really only do with LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT - normally it's not too difficult to create an RCX-based version of an NXT 'bot or vice-versa, but this one would be nearly impossible to recreate with the older parts. For those of you who have a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT kit and want directions, full building instructions are available. Of course, from there, you should come up with your own ideas for sensors and other motors, but this is a great starting point.
Details: Here's a fun one to try at home - microscale versions of spaceships from Star Wars. You can see some good close-up shots of each of the ships individually at the link up above. Most of the parts aren't that hard to find here, but I'd find that x-wing or y-wing pretty challenging. The Millennium Falcon looks particularly realistic - I love the use of minifig binoculars and rounded bricks on the top of that one.
Details: Here's another clever minifig-scale model by Moko - a set of vacuum cleaners Only one of them is in the picture here, but you can see both at the link featured above. Other minifig-scale parts - such as a set of handlebars - are mixed with TECHNIC parts and some other LEGO elements (to be honest, I don't even recognize all of them this time out - he didn't cheat, did he?) The shapely minifig using the vacuum cleaners is a nice bit of technique as well.
Details: There are really amazing - you really have to take a close look at them yourself though to get the full impact. Noddy used a number of small little LEGO parts to make minifig-scale motorcycles, and then built a gorgeous sculpted landscape around them - complete with blue-flame water.
Details: Here's one of Eric Harshbarger's mosaics. This one is a bit unusual in that it is made with plates in a studs-out fashion (close up). This provides better resolution than using bricks in a studs-up fashion, but it's not as good resolution-wise as using plates in a studs-up fashion. For those of you not familiar with Harshbarger, he uses a java program of his own design called Pixelego to give him "instructions" for his mosaics. I'm not one to count that as cheating though - it's much more egregious that some buildings were moved to make the image more interesting. In any case, this is another beautiful mosaic from one of the greats of LEGO building.
Details: The photos here aren't as high-quality as you're used to seeing here, but this model is quite good. From what I can tell, this builder designed his train by mimicking a picture of a particular train from a book. There are lots of great details on this one. I especially love the way he did his wheels with TECHNIC parts. Actually, that hook-up for the front wheel looks pretty clever too. I'm assuming that there's a smooth tile in there that we can't see providing extra support to the model. The only problem with this gorgeous engine is that it is not powered in any way - but then again, there's not a place where any standard LEGO train motor would have fit here anyway.
Details: Here's one I don't recommend trying at home (unless you don't mind getting your LEGO bricks dirty): this is a sculpture of a garden gnome. It's pretty effective and straight forward. Bill Ward, like Eric Harshbarger, but unlike most of the people who work for the LEGO Group, prefers the challenge of making sculptures only with LEGO bricks - never other LEGO parts, no slopes, no plates, not even that little effect the real professionals do to make eyes have pupils at a normal looking size. This has the side effect of not being quite as realistic as it could be, but looking more like it's actually something that anyone could build with LEGO bricks. After all, if it's just 3 commercially available tubs of standard parts (as the description says), then it really looks like a LEGO project. The trick is to work at such a scale as to make sure that you still get the "boxy" effect of only using regular bricks without sacrificing too much in the way of curves or details. This gnome does this pretty effectively - the parts that look oversized blend in really well.
In any case, I'd hate to be the one to clean dirt out of the bottom of this guy. Maybe you should only try building garden gnomes for your fake indoor plants.
Details: This is the latest in a series of robots that attempts to sort LEGO bricks. I've seen quite a few brick sorters in my day, but most of them are fairly primitive machines that need to be fed pieces individually and only sort by color (not by size). This one, on the other hand, makes use of both an RCX and an NXT to automate everything - it sorts sizes and colors, and it can work directly from a pile of bricks dumped into the top of it. A bit of cheating was used here, but I suspect that it would be possible to create a version of this that doesn't involve cheating - but that would take a bit more time. The summary explains that a third-party sensor is used to allow the NXT to choose programs on the RCX, and a phototransistor is used to allow for more accurate color readings in a relatively small size (that LEGO camera would have been a bit more bulky and would have required a full computer...) All in all, this is another brilliant 'bot by Laurens. No building instructions this time out, but there are directions concerning the programs provided.
Details: This gorgeous layout was found at a German LEGO fan event this past January. That's really all I have for concrete info on this, but this is enough of a great model to feature anyway. There are just so many little details here - have a look at those architectural details, and the plants outside - and yet this is at regular minifig-scale. Some of those details were done using massive amounts of fairly obscure parts. In this picture, for example, you can see dozens of studs-not-on-top effects lined up with little turntable bases on them. That round-center tile thing you see there is really just a very large amount of dismantled turntable parts. Just gathering up enough of those parts and separating the tops from the bottoms must have taken months. Of course, that's before we get into the great uses of slopes here, and the colors! Oh, the colors...they're really shocking: note the dozens of sand red minifig legs used as an architectural feature! ...and there's not even a minifig out of place! This is a true masterpiece.
ArtAsiaPacific and People's Architecture have teamed up for Building Asia Brick By Brick, a series of presentations of original architectural LEGO models. The models are currently on a tour of sorts. Click here for dates and locations of the presentation. The models are being exhibited and soon will be auctioned to raise awareness about architectural presentation in Asia. 
- normally it's not too difficult to create an RCX-based version of an NXT 'bot or vice-versa, but this one would be nearly impossible to recreate with the older parts. For those of you who have a 
