Building St.Jakob-Park stadium Basel

[driesmiloua]

Dear forum members,

My name is Dries Neirinck and I am a grade 10 student at the International School of Basel (ISB) in Switzerland. I am working on a personal project to build a scale model of the soccer stadium St. Jakob-Park (Joggeli) in Basel. The stadium is built by the famous Basel architects Herzog & de Meuron. The Allianz Arena (football stadium in Munich) was also developed by them and I discovered that a LEGO scale model is built in Legoland Germany.

Can somebody help me "how to get started" building a scale model of a football stadium in LEGO?

Thanks in advance for your much appreciated help!

Kind regards,

Dries

[ShaydDeGrai]

I don't think there is any one "right way" to begin, but I can share what tends to work for me.

Whenever I think about a "scale" model of a real place or object, the first thing I need to pin down is exactly what "scale" I'm shooting for. If you have enough parts and patience you can build just about anything at a large scale and get the shape exactly right while packing in lots of detail, but an accurate model of something like a stadium in a large scale is a daunting and expensive proposition. I usually scale things down and that means developing an eye for abstracting away the clutter and capturing the form.

From an artist's perspective, abstraction is a technic for glossing over the details while capturing the essence needed to convey a thought or idea. The Architecture line has many good examples of this. For example the Empire State Building uses only a handful of bricks and fully assembled takes up less space on my desk than my coffee mug. It has no windows or doors or any of the other elements you notice when you see the real thing, but the shape is so dead-on your mind makes the connection for you and fills in all the details the designer omitted; you didn't need windows and doors to know that was a building, the abstracted form was enough to jar your memory and pull everything together.

When working in Lego, I find that getting the scale and abstracted form right usually begins with lots of reference photos (thank you Google) and looking for a key feature or characteristic of the structure that maps well to a particular Lego piece. If you can find the part or subassembly that really pops with respect to representing the original then you're on your way.

For example, take a look at the Robie House kit in the Architecture like. When _I_ look at images of the real Robie House, the form that sticks in my mind is the roof line - yes there's lots of great stained glass work and brickwork but it's the roof that makes me think "midwest brick pagoda" (no offense to FLW fans intended). I think the designer of the kit had the same impression because he mapped his design to match the TLG's line of low slope roof tiles so that this key feature of the building would be captured very organically; no fancy snot techniques, nothing for one's eye to figure out or one's mind to read into, just a clean model of an essential shape of the building. Mapping the roof to a particular part then dictated the scale for the rest of the model, and now knowing the scale, the designer could decide what level of detail was appropriate for the rest of the model.

I did the same thing when building my LOTR Argonath statues. The key detail I wanted to capture was the outstretched hand. I must have built and rebuilt those hands a dozen times in scales ranging from a couple of plates to twice the size of my own (real) hands until I found something that was small enough that I could actually build the entire figure, but big enough so that the form was instantly recognizable. Once I was happy with the hand, I just scaled the rest of the figure around it.

For my Minas Tirith model, I knew I wanted seven tiers and a razor-like jetty of stone slicing through the city. In this case, balancing the the thickness of the jetty and trying how to get seven concentric curved walls dictated the scale (the tightest curves were done with 1x2 "macaroni" bricks, broader curves were done with hinges and less conventional building techniques. Other than a couple arches, most of the surface detail is just odd studs and fiddly-bits meant to "suggest" the details of an ancient city rather than actually "rendering" them. Again, capture the essence and the viewer's mind will forgive a lack of detail.

For a stadium, I think the first thing I'd look at is the footprint. Ask yourself, what is the essential shape and what Lego parts will best help me capture it? If I recall, St. Jakob-Park stadium is "mostly" boxy (which works well in Lego) rather than round or oval (which can become either tedious or fragile when realizing in Lego) but it does have diagonal walls on the corners so now you need to be thinking about angled bricks or wall panels (as seen most recently in LOTR sets) or using hinges. Next, I'd look at the roof line and the various facades. It may sound silly, but grab a bit of paper and a pen and draw what _you_ think the stadium looks like _without_ having any reference photos in front of you. The things you remember to put in your drawing are probably the things you want to make sure you can build well in Lego. Find the right parts to capture these "essential" elements and the rest of the model will start to come together in your mind.

I'll often start an idea in Lego Digital Designer or ML-CAD when trying to capture these first few elements, mostly because I find it easier to rummage through a large virtual part library than to open score of trays and tubs trying to figure out which part I actually want to model a given contour or form; but I, personally, prefer working with my hands so once I think I know where I'm going, I usually abandon the virtual model and break out the bricks. If you don't have a large collection to draw from, however, a digital model is a great place to experiment and refine your design.

I hope this helps, and good luck with your project. I hope it is a pleasant experience for you and don't forgot to share your creation with us when you're done.