10278 Police Station

[Friscorays]

Being food oriented, I'm going with DS.

[Vindicare]

11 minutes ago, Rick said:

I wonder why you think this addition was necessary after the two reminders I posted asking everyone to discuss the set itself? I also asked for a friendly discussion and while I realise that, not being a native speaker myself, I may miss some subtleties of the English language here and there, I don't think the word "whiner" has many friendly connotations.

If you feel further discussion about this is necessary, you can PM me.

Apologies, I just gave my thoughts first & didn’t read through the thread. When I saw you replied to me, that was my thought. Editing now. 

[Agent 86]

I like it, but I don’t understand it.

So, the police station was presumably built first and then the lavender doughnut shop encroached upon their footprint by two studs. So, the police station then purchased and combined with the green building which seems too narrow to have ever been an independent building.

Why not just ditch the green building as a separate building, expand the doughnut shop to its required / real width and give us a police station with a single, consistent and grander facade?

Toilets continue to be a bizarre and inconsistent addition - there are toilets for the gaol cell and police station, but not the thief’s studio apartment? Maybe that’s why he’s committing such an obvious crime - to be locked up so he can empty his bowels?

It seems to me that the facade was designed first and the interior is just a hodgepodge in response to the facade’s limitations.

Edit: I’m not a fan of incomplete walls between the police station and doughnut shop either. I guess they did that for adult hands? But, it just seems cheap and a bit nonsensical to me.

Similarly, the escape tunnel seems ... odd given you have to pull apart the gaol cell to use it. Play features like this seem unnecessary in a supposedly 18+ set!

Edited November 27, 2020 by Agent 86

[AFOLguy1970]

This one also works well as a standalone since it looks good on all sides.  Several past modulars have had sides which were not really displayable.  Similar to the PR, even the "blank" sides are kept neat and look fairly clean.  

[Vindicare]

2 hours ago, MAB said:

I think the facade is great. It is a nice classical design and will go nicely with the other classical looking ones. I'm not a fan of the narrow buildings. The shop is not too bad, but the heavily set back jail part is going to look a bit odd when another building is put up against it. I also cannot work out why the walls inside do not go to the ceilings. I can see they use the new curved parts nicely to smooth the walls, but why have a gap between a police station and the shop? There are some lovely details inside, the phone and typewriter are particularly nice prints.

 

Maybe it’s so the cops can get a nice whiff of the crash donut smell rising up in the morning.

1 hour ago, DimiNi said:

Another question:

 

In the new "Modulars Buildings Collection" , whats the most left Building in the logo?

 

The newspaper stand has more newspapers than the Bookshop Set books

I was wondering that as well... I have no idea. The others are easily identifiable. EDIT...it’s the Corner Garage. 

1 hour ago, GeoBrick said:

"PH" for "Precinct House"? Can be used to mean "Police Headquarters" too.

That could work. That name sounds better for what this building is. To me, a station feels bigger(maybe that’s a learned condition from seeing all the City police stations over the years...).

 

I’m so excited to see the roomy empty roof. Looks like the perfect spot for the Batsignal! And I love the clue board with the red “string” connecting them. Question is...is it cookies or donuts? And are the cookie smugglers & donut thief in cahoots?! 

Edited November 27, 2020 by Vindicare

[Aanchir]

1 hour ago, Dakar A said:

99% sure it's to allow easier play inside. There's no structural need to have the walls go all the way to the top, so the designers probably opted to both save some bricks there, as well as opening up the interior to better allow you to pose minifigs inside.

Yeah, the interior walls on the bottom floor of Brick Bank, Town Hall, and Green Grocer were the same way. When the rooms are this narrow and the exterior walls are this high, lowering the interior wall height helps ensure that you don't have to reach in as far from above to pick up or rearrange the parts or figures inside.

If you prefer to fill it in, it shouldn't be too expensive to buy the bricks you need to bring the interior walls to the same height as the exterior ones, since tan is a pretty common color for basic bricks and plates. You wouldn't even have to change out the curved elements, since they seem like they'd match the curvature of an inverted curved slope.

1 hour ago, DimiNi said:

The newspaper stand has more newspapers than the Bookshop Set books

The bookshop set has more than 30 books altogether — it's just that only one has a cover that hinges open. Of the remainder, six are represented by removable tiles or jumper plates, while the rest are integrated with the bookshelves. Green Grocer was pretty much the same way — most of the items on its shelves could not be removed without taking apart the shelves themselves.

As awesome as the hinged LEGO book covers are, they've never been very accurately scaled to LEGO minifigures or buildings, and when you put a bunch of them together on a shelf, they start to take up a ridiculous amount of space pretty quickly. Even at minimum, a shelving unit designed to hold two rows of three books each inevitably winds up taller and wider than an adult minifigure. That size might be suitable for a wizard's ancient magical tomes, but not for encyclopedia-sized hardcovers, let alone mass market paperbacks!

No idea what you'd abbreviate this set's name to, but to be honest I find it a little strange that people are so intent on abbreviating these sets' names. It's not like the names are very long compared to, say, the Winter Village series. And if you do need to condense them, you can always use the set numbers like people sometimes do would when talking about other themes.

Edited November 27, 2020 by Aanchir

[_citizen_dane_]

35 minutes ago, Agent 86 said:

I like it, but I don’t understand it.

So, the police station was presumably built first and then the lavender doughnut shop encroached upon their footprint by two studs. So, the police station then purchased and combined with the green building which seems too narrow to have ever been an independent building.

Why not just ditch the green building as a separate building, expand the doughnut shop to its required / real width and give us a police station with a single, consistent and grander facade?

Toilets continue to be a bizarre and inconsistent addition - there are toilets for the gaol cell and police station, but not the thief’s studio apartment? Maybe that’s why he’s committing such an obvious crime - to be locked up so he can empty his bowels?

It seems to me that the facade was designed first and the interior is just a hodgepodge in response to the facade’s limitations.

You’ve echoed my thoughts exactly. Maybe it comes from my intense interest in historical, real-world North American city planning, but I always get a chuckle out of these modulars which include buildings, that in real-life, would only have a frontage of maybe three or four meters. I don’t know. It’s LEGO, of course, so you’re not bound to the arbitrary realities of real life zoning and practicality, but that won’t stop me from thinking they look just a wee bit silly.

I do think your second point is spot on. Since LEGO’s broken from the larger, pre-Detective’s Office frontages, space has been a real issue. When most facades range from sixteen to twenty studs-wide, having four taken up by stairs doesn’t leave much usable floor behind. And that’s not me saying that space in the pre-D.O. buildings had a lot of great use either — often suffering the inverse problem of too much space making them seem empty — but in a case like this, a city’s central police station, I think a large thirty-two wide facade would have been justified. Either that, or like you say, maybe have the station enlarged to something like twenty-two studs, and the donut shop to ten.

Having got that all out of the way, I do genuinely really like the design of the central building. The technique used to create the quoins stands out as especially unique, while the use of a bog-standard, red rubber band as linking tape on the post-it board is a really clever touch. 

[Roebuck]

3 hours ago, Blazej_Holen said:

Sadly ... and no animals :/

3 hours ago, AFOLguy1970 said:

 There is another bluebird, likely to complement the one in the Bookshop so we can now have a pair. 

I agree it is nice to get a second bluebird since I felt one was missing from last years set, however more animals should have been included at least a dog at the bare minimum

I like the plants in the set and the doughnut shop goes well with last years modular. It looks good from the outside, but wondering if the police station is a little bare on the inside (need better pictures)

 

1 hour ago, Vindicare said:

First things first...how are we going to abbreviate this? PS is already taken.

PS2

[froggy95]

1 hour ago, Rick said:

They spoke about that in the reveal video. Three (four if you count the kiosk) different facades create some variation in the modular street. They started doing this with Brick Bank and Detective's Office, by the way. I guess it prevents a row of 32-wide "blocks" on a street.

The newsstand in front, with the same color scheme, makes it look like a very narrow building. The unrelated Suds banner also throws you off. Poor choice IMO. I’ll probably change the color to match the main building. 

[Grover]

I would not recommend "PoS" for Police Station (not a great meaning in English...).  PO for Police Station, on the other hand, might be OK if we want to stick to two letters.  That will be problematic if we anticipate an Post Office though.

[Brettski]

11 minutes ago, Grover said:

I would not recommend "PoS" for Police Station (not a great meaning in English...).  PO for Police Station, on the other hand, might be OK if we want to stick to two letters.  That will be problematic if we anticipate an Post Office though.

So put the BS beside the PoS? 

[Pirean_Grammaticul]

15 minutes ago, Grover said:

I would not recommend "PoS" for Police Station (not a great meaning in English...).

that's actually very accurate lol

[TeriXeri]

Not bad, just think it'd be a bit too large in a City / 3-in-1 scale town (I don't have other modulars , but no City Police Station either yet).

It's low priority for me, but if I end up getting this I'd probably use it as a starting point of a custom Police Station or some other build, quite a lot of cohesive color, Tan from top to bottom is quite nice.

I do hope those flat cap police officers come in regular sets again.

Edited November 27, 2020 by TeriXeri

[JintaiZ]

1 hour ago, Wesley D said:

Only thing I really dislike is the black box and the 18+ logo, as it both looks too harsh for a toy that brings me and many LEGO fans so much joy.

All I can say is that we are pretty much used to LEGO's new 18+ sets. Some may dislike the all-black box, but I think it adds a premium feeling and I actually like it.

For the 18+ logo, it feels appropriate to me. Well... it looks like a long and challenging build.

[Aanchir]

4 minutes ago, _citizen_dane_ said:

You’ve echoed my thoughts exactly. Maybe it comes from my intense interest in historical, real-world North American city planning, but I always get a chuckle out of these modulars which include buildings, that in real-life, would only have a frontage of maybe three or four meters. I don’t know. It’s LEGO, of course, so you’re not bound to the arbitrary realities of real life zoning and practicality, but that won’t stop me from thinking they look just a wee bit silly.

Buildings that narrow might not be particularly common in real life, but they do exist, especially in historic cities! For example, these two articles mention a few examples in NYC:
https://untappedcities.com/2013/08/15/5-of-manhattan-narrowest-buildings/
https://untappedcities.com/2012/11/15/the-skinny-shops-of-columbus-avenue/

Personally I like the sets that put more than one building on a baseplate in this manner. Realistic or not, it helps to break up the feeling of monotony you'd get if EVERY building on a modular street were exactly 16 or 32 studs wide. Plus, a lot of the sorts of businesses that LEGO puts in these narrower buildings don't need a whole lot of square footage to cover the essential details people would expect to see inside. So fitting them in a narrower space helps make the "world" of the modular buildings feel a little more complete without having to dedicate a full 16 studs' worth of width to relatively mundane sorts of businesses.

15 minutes ago, froggy95 said:

The newsstand in front, with the same color scheme, makes it look like a very narrow building. The unrelated Suds banner also throws you off. Poor choice IMO. I’ll probably change the color to match the main building. 

I suspect that perhaps part of the reason for the color choice on that right-hand building was that it allows the interiors of the jail and interrogation room to look a little cold and gloomy compared to the brighter, warmer color of the rest of the station. Sort of like how a lot of Town and City police stations (60270, 7498, 7744, 6332, etc) have mostly shades of gray for the walls of their jail cells, but brighter colors like blue and white for the walls of the station.

I'd be interested to see some pictures of how the set looks after you mod that rightmost building, but one way or another, I suspect it will dramatically change the vibe in those two rooms!

6 minutes ago, TeriXeri said:

Not bad, just think it'd be a bit too large in a City / 3-in-1 scale town (I don't have other modulars , but no City Police Station either yet).

That's a valid concern! This building is a little over 32 bricks tall, whereas City police stations tend to be around 23 bricks tall. But at the same time, this set's footprint is a lot more compact than most City police stations. City police and fire stations also tend to have relatively more modern-looking architecture, whereas the Modular Buildings Collection favors an early to mid 20th century look.

[Boettner Builds]

2 hours ago, DimiNi said:

Another question:

 

In the new "Modulars Buildings Collection" , whats the most left Building in the logo?

 

The newspaper stand has more newspapers than the Bookshop Set books

It’s the Corner Garage. And your point about the newsstand is both on point and sad.

[BrickFit26]

Really great design. I love the Donut shop and the details inside. And I love the billboard advertising the laundromat from the Brick Bank. 

[Boettner Builds]

The more I look at it the more I like it. But, to me, looks nothing like a police station. So I’ll be MODding mine into a library. Making it fill up a 32x32 baseplate and deleting the 2 side buildings.

 

[Chilis]

This is all I could as for, totally adore it!

[Thedarkmaster2]

Excellent addition to the police lineup.

The blue bird is a nice little avian addtion and the french bandit with the doughnut fishing pole is just humerous

[Kalahari134]

I'm not sure if it's big enough for me. I may feel forced to buy two...

[jonwil]

WOW. Just WOW. As a HUGE fan of police stations I want one and I may even pay RRP for it...

 

[1974]

This has to be the worst italian restaurant ever!

But it's a nice police HQ. Good idea with the side buildings

However, I'm not seeing any cool building details nor any nice interior furniture. Nothing that surpasses the PC and that was quite a number of years ago

The columns at the front are just too easy, give us something better, please. TLG have done it before

It does look nice, but there's nothing extraordinary about it. it's rather bland ...

 

[TurboBrick]

38 minutes ago, Boettner Builds said:

The more I look at it the more I like it. But, to me, looks nothing like a police station. So I’ll be MODding mine into a library. Making it fill up a 32x32 baseplate and deleting the 2 side buildings.

Ditto on the modding. Really, just replace the sign over the portico and you're good to go. I'm thinking museum: my Sanctum Sanctorum museum MOC is getting a bit dated, and this fits the bill. Your library is great, and this would also would make a decent school. They made it sooo easy to repurpose with the 1x4 tile.

That said, I do like the two side buildings, at least the donut shop.

Edited November 27, 2020 by TurboBrick

[MT480]

Just now, 1974 said:

This has to be the worst italian restaurant ever!

But it's a nice police HQ. Good idea with the side buildings

However, I'm not seeing any cool building details nor any nice interior furniture. Nothing that surpasses the PC and that was quite a number of years ago

The columns at the front are just too easy, give us something better, please. TLG have done it before

It does look nice, but there's nothing extraordinary about it. it's rather bland ...

 

Hahaha, I like your sense of humor.  Yea the worst italian restaurant ever!  Anyway, is there a designer video up? Or anyone know when they usually release one?  And I’m not talking about the live reveal.