lgorlando

Greetings fellow builders! It has been many, MANY, months since I posted on Eurobricks but I am pleased to return with a new project based on the Super Stack Modular building technique I developed on my first project Downtown Metro. This second Set "5th and Main" is a new Super Stack engineered in a similar way to Downtown Metro but with less material and stronger features. The base is 4 buildings, 3 formal and 1 core unit in the rear (the core unit is not an actual building but rather a support block). The base units are placed on four 16 x 16 plates with technic bricks that allow for connecting. The two sides buildings are designed symmetrically to connect to the corner unit which is smaller than the other units. These four units serve as the base and since they all have 4 walls, the base is very strong. Due to the technic connection design, the building is easy to disassemble, move and transport as opposed to the original super stack, Downtown Metro, which was one unit built on a 32 x 32 baseplate; dense with bricks and difficult to move. The tower units are all the same proportion and scale. Each are built on 6x16 plates and are all modular from the base to the roof pieces. The only exception is the end tower (the dark orange building) It is 8x6. The key to the towers rising above the skyline is a series of base unites in the rear. The base units are composed of 1x5x6 panel pieces and 1x2x5 bricks. They are conservative, strong and light on parts. They give the Super Stack it's Faux proportions and save on windows and special colors. Design Work: There are some tricks to use when designing a city scene for a super stack: 1) Use strong details for the base and compliment your colors. Complimentary colors are pieces that look good together. e.g. dark red merges with brown merging with tan pulled together by light grey. This gives the city a realistic feel. 2) Use glass, windows and steel color parts for the towers. Keep it simple but repetitive thus you replicate a modern city look. You don't want your eye focused on a really detailed sky scraper which defeats the entire super stack project. Focus the detail on the base level and allow the eye to "travel the rest of the structure". 3) Use a transition tower so that you can merge with your existing Cafe Corner Style buildings. The transition building will contain masonry detail and windows similar to the official line of CC style buildings. This transition is important so that your city is consistent and progressive. Hope you enjoy (I will add additional photos soon). Cheers! EDIT: Per a request below, here are the two Super Modulars combined. Kind of cluttered since they are both corner units, and massive!

B-PM-1D I've been a Eurobrick fan for a long time but I've recently taken up a member role in the EB community and so this is my first MOC on Eurobricks, a hospital built in Cafe Corner Modular style called Mercy General. MOC: 2010 Lego City Hospital: Mercy General “Medicine is of all the arts the most noble…” The First Law of Hippocrates In the heart of Lego city is a great institution of healing and hope, Mercy General Hospital. From emergencies to injury and disease, Mercy General is set up to deal with the urgent care needs of Lego citizens. With it’s state of the art design, the hospital measures 64 studs wide and has 3 and 5 floors of space over a massive layout. Facilities includes emergency vehicle drop off, a helicopter pad, a doctors office, a maternity ward, overnight rooms, a surgery center, radiology room, administrative offices and a gorgeous lobby for guests. There’s even a triage center and a pharmacy! Reconfigure the hospital with just the twist and turn of the buildings for a layout that best fits your city! Whether you arrive by car, ambulance or helicopter the professional doctors and staff of Mercy General will know just how to take care of you! Introduction I’ve been hoping for a hospital from TLC for some time. We’ve had police stations, fire stations, more fire stations but the hospital situation has been dire for some time (check the Eurobricks post on health care for a good take on the situation). I decided that my little plastic city couldn’t afford another chipped hand or scratched up face thus I set out to design a hospital that my town would be proud of. The result is Mercy General, the most comprehensive health care system in the world! (my world is a small table in my garage). About the Design During the planning of Mercy General, I did a lot of research on hospitals and medical facility design. From a city planning perspective a hospital is a major landmark and the real estate for most hospitals usually consists of many city blocks. Many major city hospitals house multiple medical buildings that may be set up as a vertical cityscape of towers or as a sprawling citywide campus. Around the world I noticed that a lot of new hospitals have very distinct architectural features that are fresh and modern ranging from the playful (seen in modern children’s hospitals) to the very contemporary and high tech. The larger modern structures seem vast and expansive incorporating clean materials like steel and glass; the long design lines and the use of certain material seem to invoke the kind of calmness that would one would come to expect in a care facility yet behind the façade of materials is a practical medical facility. Having found inspiration in modern hospitals, my dilemma was building a “modular-sized” hospital for a modest table town city. I love the large scale hospitals that are often done by professional builders and LUG groups but I didn’t want to overuse materials. I also did not want My Own Version of a production set (or some other existing MOC on the web). Thus, I set out to incorporate MOC hospital would complement my existing modular buildings as well as fit perfectly with TLC production CC style sets like Green Grocer and Fire Brigade as well as non CC style buildings (one that I call “playscale” ) like 7641 city corner and the 7744 Police HQ. I determined that the proportions of my MOC would have to scale to the CC buildings yet the final design shouldn’t appear to dwarf other playscale buildings. For inspiration I turn to the existing TLC production hospitals 7892 and my personal favorite 6380 emergency treatment center. 7892 has a modern feel to it with the tall tower and straight lines. I never did like the molded “rock” platform baseplate and the ramp for the paramedic seemed awkward. 6380 on the other hand was a model that I always kept fully constructed in my collection. It was a great addition to my young city in its heyday and 6380 just seemed functional, metropolitan, and the layout felt “hospital-like” (comforting and functional). Seeing the potential in the 7892 and 6380 inspiration, I also wanted to maintain that classic red and white hospital color scheme, though my original hospital was meant to be a modern color scheme of greys, blues and whites; the red and white just screamed classic. Funny enough however, choosing red and white really hampered the style process. I literally spent months revising the design because a red hospital seemed too harsh yet a mostly white hospital was too dull. How to solve this color problem? I use red as an accent (like a beacon of emergency) rather than a base color. I definitely wanted a mostly white building and to keep the white from looking plain I use the power of shape, texture and depth to bring out the light and shadow of the “colorless” element. The results: Basic Red bricks as the tower (the beacon) and jumper plates, tiles and textured bricks to create depth in the white building. My original concept was for a modern facility but I decided after seeing classic European and early American hospitals that the building should have some classical architecture. ADVICE: classical architecture works well for any city layout if it is not overdone. I love the Greek revival style that is used in courthouses, universities and banks so I formatted the focal front of the main white building applying the fundamentals of classic Greek temple design (columns, capitals, architrave, etc). The Greek style design was especially relevant given the symbolism in medicine which is borrowed from the ancient Greeks (Hippocratic Oath anyone?). The rest of the main white building has a classic European style to it with the stone offsets on the walls and corners; there are arches above the windows throughout and I strategically place the arches to tie in the design of the entire facility. An obvious trait of to many modern hospitals is the vast number of windows so I was sure to place lots and lots of windows throughout (184 window pieces!). Spare no expense! OK, enough about the architecture, The build itself…again, lots of jumper plates, flat tiles, 1 x 1 bricks with the headlight stud, Lots of long plates (which are actually pretty difficult to incorporate in a building because long plates flex and long-wide plates are rare or non existent.) I use dozens of the new 1 x 2 x 3 windows (hard to find, I had to buy them by the hundreds from PAB online), and it was very important to plan out the understructure so that there were no inadequate or unnecessary connections for the entire structure to lock together and to stand firm. The main hospital has 3 levels in two buildings. The space will be used for the majority of modular rooms that I have planned (the Rooms will be detailed in Part 2 of my Mercy General Hospital Review). The Modern portion of the facility has the tower, the emergency vehicle parking and drop off port and of course what hospital would be complete without the helicopter pad? The red tower is mostly patient overnight rooms with beds (see Part 2). As for my favorite part of the design; the hospital is convertible! (no not drop top) it transforms using hinge bricks along the inside walls. Set on four 16x32 plates I noticed the potential late in the design phase for a hospital that could be configured into multiple facilities; if I could set each building on a separate plate each could stand alone hinged together. I spent a lot of days on and off tweaking this feature. I placed the main building on the center two 16x32 plates (or one 32x32 plate) and the outer two buildings, the main care facility and the Emergency vehicle port, on hinges. I layout out windows and doorways to match up perfectly in any open or closed configuration so that when the building is reconfigured it will have doors, windows and walls that connect uninterrupted to the building. The end result is a six hospital configurations out of one design! My four favorites configurations: Mercy General Health Care System (1), University Research Hospital (2), Metro Memorial Hospital (3), City System Urgent Care Hospital (4). 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) Like all good CC style buildings, I added a few minfigure characters to the mix to bring out the personality of the facility. Doctors, Surgeons, Nurses in hospital “themed scrubs”, A family with newborn baby, and various patients; a police officer in serious condition, as my town gets bigger my city streets can get kind of rough, there is also a wheel chair which is loosely based on a concept learned here. I think my favorite item is the Angel of Mercy statue, it is simple yet gives you that feel good feature. I’ll be back with a much more brief part two presentation of Mercy General showing the various modular rooms that I built. These were actually more fun than the hospital build (I even made a custom sticker sheet!). Overall I am pleased with the design, the CC style proportions and the color scheme. I hope you enjoyed the tour and the presentation. See you in the city! UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE FOR PART II, CLICK HERE

1. castor-troy -1 2. cimddwc -1 10.RoxYourBlox -1 25.snaillad -1 27.Myko -1

This one is my favorite! Good Luck!

Greetings! It's Summer Break so let the big building begin! How do you fit your entire city center on one 32 x 32 baseplate? I call it the "Super-Stack Modular"! Designed to bring a metropolis look and feel to the modular series, while maintaining limited real-estate, minimal brick count, broad yet realistic colorization, as well as "Lego Playability". This 8 story city center relies on clever frame work, mathematical proportions, strategic focal points and vertical distribution. There are 16 modular sections each proportioned carefully so that the taller buildings could reconfigure anywhere on the upper level. The base is actually one large "mantel", and it is the most complex of the design. The mantel design was proportioned in "3D" to achieve the magic of independent buildings collaborating beneath a rising city skyline. Because it needs to support the remaining 15 modular structures, the frame work is weaved with layers of intersecting beams throughout. There is a thick "mother" plate independent of the mantel that helps keep the top building flat and stable. Each of the top buildings is re-configurable so that you can customize the skyline. I focused on a corner center that would merge a residential building like the Green Grocer with a commercial building like the Emporium. The Dark Red Building blends into commercial, while the large gothic tower merges with residential. It was a very challenging design (6 months) tedious build (5 weeks) but the effect is most pleasing! Life's been busy but I am happy to share with you all when I can. Thanks so much! -lg

totally in love with this layout! Very nice!

Thanks all for the feedback and remarks! I would love to see TLC make a skyline type set with tall buildings. Perhaps it's in the forecast. In the meantime I'm going to add to this theme when I get a chance. Hopefully I'll have something before the end of summer. Brick on!

Brick count is about 3500 give or take a 100 or so.

The Brown traditional minifig head was in the Slave 1 second edition set. There are quite a few brown heads on bricklink, I have quite a few of these and a few of the the pink flesh color; I like a diverse city as well! http://www.bricklink.com/catalogPG.asp?P=3626bp01&colorID=88

I've been practicing my city photography for a few years now. I think this is a great topic!

Great, It wasn't just me then. I got a new computer recently and it has runtime 2010 and I haven't been able to use the export list for bricklink. Just a blank <inventory>. Doesn't paste in note pad either. There is hope...

This may have been "over tech-y-fied". Simply break up your model… I never let lego have any of my models...ASSEMBLED... Break up your LDD Model then save the new model as "SomeModelnameScrambled" You can then order the pieces in your model thru the LDD order link with no worries that TLG will "own your original design". Of course ordering through LDD is about $10 more expensive because you will get an instruction manual and box but you save time (and programming). I've done this lots in the past. It works like a charm! You will get a box image of a nasty disassembled model but it is indecipherable and you then use the pieces in your original, neat model. Good luck!

Hi: I keep a summary of my sets here. I have many more sets coming up this year. You can check the link often.

Hi Fredrik and welcome to town building! One of my favorite sites for inspiration is bricktowntalk.blogspot.com. They recently started featuring a regular posting of inspirational photos of city buidings. I am definatly inspired by their posts. Share your photos of your finished buildings when you get a chance!

I totally agree! If the large modulars are too much for your budget go for a small creator set like the log cabin, the apple tree house or the upcoming house on the hillside. I used to build really thin models with no back wall like the City Corner set. You can build up your city fast using this technique. I also google images of "town buildings". Don't worry about color (try to keep your buildings to 2 or 3 colors per building only, then focus on window distribution using a flat front and evolve into corner buildings and finally develop a cute but simple window /door accent and a realistic (but not overly dramatic) roof accent, most people mess up here. The story writes itself from there. Good Luck! Examples of buildings simple to complex using the same color scheme: Simple Medium Complex

Yeah, I think Vader11 officially has the longest street! Wow! And yep, the grand emporium (L@go's) over the street is wonderful!

LOL, it's kind of sad. I'm practically in rehab for this stuff.

I used to have a nice size modular style city. I suppose if you lined it up it would be rather long It's in boxes now. The closet and the lego room belong to my daughter now

So many great creations, fantasic contest! Wish we had more points to give... 2 points Nieks 1 point kost u grlu 1 point Dix 1 point Etzel

I should say unbelievable! First, thanks to Superkalle for organizing a spectacular event and for promoting the massive potential of LDD. Second, thanks to all who voted and participated. This is my first “Lego” contest ever and I am overjoyed to be considered by my piers here on Eurobricks for something that I really love. I truly enjoyed the contest entries, there were so many models that should be real sets! We should all be very excited about the new designers emerging within our community and across the web. I do believe that LDD is finally breaking lose in the Lego Fan World and we were here when it was happening! Regarding the winning model: I’d be happy to share with the community some background on how I developed the Anastasia Astoria. I’ll be posting a short guide on the techniques this weekend here on Eurobricks. I really think you’ll find it very useful. I look forward to hearing from you all. Thanks again! Congrats to all the participants and winners!

I used to be one of the most popular builders on Lego.com; how do I know, because I was ripped almost daily. I would see my models posted over and over by users sometimes right next to my own upload. I suppose I didn't mind so much since our generation of internet users is supposed to share information (and most posters are kids and they are just trying to have fun) but then my LDD files got loose on the open web (MOC pages, etc) with other users claiming my models as their own creations. I developed a bad taste in my mouth about this and I haven't posted on Lego.com in almost 2 years. I also see some LDD files on ebay of all places (I don't assume the files don't actually belong to the seller) but that is just plain scary so I tend to keep my LDD files locked down though it really shouldn't be that way in a community such as ours.

Wow! This is really nice! I love corner buildings because they are very challenging. You did a great job with this rendition of the theatre with a lot of good connections points and nice bonus features like the stairs and double ticket booths. The interior is my favorite (nice use of the Yetti)

Are you kidding me! I'd would have an iPhone or better yet and iPad TOMORROW if they had an LDD app. Spinning virtual bricks with your fingers, how great would that be while on the road! Fantastic suggestion!

Since it's launch some years ago, I am convinced LDD is essential to planning a MOC. Until, recently, the parts were limited but you could still plan the shape, color and composition of your Lego idea into a living concept. With LDD you can build a virtual structure, suspend it in mid air, add a floor, Add a section of window or door (or wings and engines, or whatever)and then fill in the blank. It is physically impossible to do this with real parts. I can change the colors move a part, Copy a section and paste it over and over in a repeat design. If you don't like something you can delete it. Did you make a mistake? Click Undo (I sometimes have trouble separating myself from the virtual world and the real world wishing i could "undo" a physical MOC The best part of LDD in my opinion: I can save a "template" of my favorite custom design elements and use them in future virtual MOCs. When planning in LDD I try to remain realistic; the key for me has been to make sure the parts I use are parts in my existing collection or are easy to obtain so that I will be able to build a real MOC once I generated the instructions. Superkalle introduced us to the Lego Universe Mode which is the holy grail of unlimited design access in LDD. Universe mode allows use of about any part Lego manufactures which is a dream come true for Lego planners and experienced MOCers. Need a part list? Superkalle has a great program that lets you generate the parts you used in your model. The program links the LDD part number to common part numbers used in Peeron and Bricklink databases. With these tools, you are master of MOCs! So I say invest some time in LDD (hint: Learn the Keyboard copy and past shortcuts) and you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

I never did give up my 80's classic style building skill set but I love the modern modular buildings. Thus I mix the modular and classic style as well. You can achieve a realistic effect if you follow these guidelines: Try to make the modular buildings look very refined and interesting. This can be expensive but worth the visual appeal. When setting up a city layout, place the more interesting buildings near the front and edges of your layout clustered together for a nice "market" effect. Because there are so many classic "playscale" models like Town Plan and City Corner, I try to build lots of 3 sided buildings with a modern feel so they don't impose on the detailed Modular buildings. You can typically make playscale buildings for cheap since you just need basic shaped bricks, plates and windows constructed, stacked in repeat patterns. I set the cheap buildings up in the background, staggered (offset from one another). I am particular on keeping playscale building colors in grey, brown, tan, or white. This is a visual "trick" so that the plain color buildings won't overwhelm the rest of your layout and you achieve a nice "big city" effect. City Layout City Layout with Vehicles (still waiting on bigger space before setting up the trains) City Buildings Modular City Buildings Classic "Playscale" style (open in the back)