Using 1x or 2x wide bricks for buildings?

[AxelE55]

Hello! As a guy who has recently gotten into creating buildings (non-modular) in LEGO I was wondering if it is best to use the 1x4 bricks or 2x4 bricks as the basic part of the walls. On BrickLink in many cases they are the same price, so I was thinking that the 2x wide bricks would be superior? In a modular build where you need to tile each floor to make the level easily removable it might be better to go with the 1x wide bricks, since you then only need 1x wide tiles.

 

Do you guys have any opinions or advice on this topic? Which bricks are more versitile to invest in?

 

Thanks! :-)

[Lyichir]

2-wide walls are really thicker than you'd need for the walls of most ordinary buildings. Not to say they wouldn't work, but it cuts down on the amount of interior space you get for a given exterior. And the main advantage 2-wide walls offer, the ability to have different colors or patterns on the interior and exterior of a wall, only really works if you mostly use 1x bricks anyway.

[AxelE55]

10 hours ago, Lyichir said:

2-wide walls are really thicker than you'd need for the walls of most ordinary buildings. Not to say they wouldn't work, but it cuts down on the amount of interior space you get for a given exterior. And the main advantage 2-wide walls offer, the ability to have different colors or patterns on the interior and exterior of a wall, only really works if you mostly use 1x bricks anyway.

Thank you for telling me this point. :) Just feels so odd that a 2x2 can often be 30% cheaper than a 1x2 brick, in light bluish gray for example. I also thought that the 2x wide is more stable, and thus works better if you use the old 45 degree slopes as roofs & need a support structure under it. One other plus side with 1x wide is that they take up half the space in storage/shipping.

 

Maybe the bigger you are making the buildings the better the 2x wide choice is...

[MAB]

2x2 can be cheaper than 1x2 because more people want 1x2 bricks for their buildings. 2xX brick built buildings remind me of what we used to build as kids in the 1970s.

[Mylenium]

15 hours ago, AxelE55 said:

Which bricks are more versitile to invest in?

Definitely only 1x bricks. Even if you were to use 2x bricks a lot, you'd still need quite a bunch of 1x bricks to fill in gaps if you have introduced irregularities in your walls with protrusions, holes and similar stuff. The irony of course is that 2x walls are actually more representative of load-bearing walls on large, multi-storeyed buildings, but I'd still only use them if there was a specific reason like e.g. a technique to add windows with insets where you would need to cover up and compensate that extra offset on the inside, anyway. In any case, 2x bricks are making less and less sense these days, not just for buildings, so I'd only invest in small numbers of them. You may occasionally need e.g. a 2x6 brick to stabilize some larger gap and of course you'd use 2x4 and 2x2 bricks to fill large hollows, but where the actual visual details are concerned, on many models 2x bricks are barely of any relevance anymore.

Mylenium

[Peppermint_M]

2x brick is for filler and foundations! Honesty my only use for them these days.