Modular Building Sets - Rumours and Discussion

[carlo.fadel]

7 hours ago, meliander said:

And the 2nd one Expert Vehicle i guess

And the 3rd one the Manchester's licensed.

[BrickFit26]

17 hours ago, Blazej_Holen said:

But the teal colour on car should be replaced...

Maybe they will, but doesn't seem likely.

16 hours ago, Vindicare said:

It’s funny, because when I first saw the Bookshop it immediately read San Francisco to me. The townhouse especially so is very reminiscent of what you see in SF...bright colors & all. I guess people see what they see depending on where they’re located. 

As someone who used to live in the bay area, this is so true.

[ThatDarnHippie]

20 hours ago, Vindicare said:

It’s funny, because when I first saw the Bookshop it immediately read San Francisco to me. The townhouse especially so is very reminiscent of what you see in SF...bright colors & all. I guess people see what they see depending on where they’re located. 

The designer, Wes Talbott, actually specifically cites the Victorian homes of San Francisco as the inspiration for the townhouse. In the creator video, San Francisco houses are also featured on the inspiration board.

[BrickFit26]

It was cool to see that in the designer video with Wes.

[Terrasher]

I've been looking at my modular buildings (still got Bookshop to build) and I noticed that the last large, 32x32 modular we got was Town Hall all the way back in 2012.

All of the other modulars since TH have either been multipled buildings in a single set (DO, AS, BB, BS), buildings that occupy the full 32-stud width only in the ground floor (PR & DD) or corner buildings (PC, BB and CG). I guess Palace Cinema and Corner Garage are also single-building sets, but they're both corners, so they leave a gap in a street display.

If the "2 normal buildings, then 1 corner building" formula is true, then I'd imagine next year's set will not be a corner building. I wonder if we'll get a single-building set like Green Grocer, Fire Brigade or Town Hall sometime soon. What are some buildings that would warrant using the whole 32x32 baseplate on their own? A museum? A police station? A school?

[ReplicaOfLife]

10 hours ago, Terrasher said:

I've been looking at my modular buildings (still got Bookshop to build) and I noticed that the last large, 32x32 modular we got was Town Hall all the way back in 2012.

All of the other modulars since TH have either been multipled buildings in a single set (DO, AS, BB, BS), buildings that occupy the full 32-stud width only in the ground floor (PR & DD) or corner buildings (PC, BB and CG). I guess Palace Cinema and Corner Garage are also single-building sets, but they're both corners, so they leave a gap in a street display.

If the "2 normal buildings, then 1 corner building" formula is true, then I'd imagine next year's set will not be a corner building. I wonder if we'll get a single-building set like Green Grocer, Fire Brigade or Town Hall sometime soon. What are some buildings that would warrant using the whole 32x32 baseplate on their own? A museum? A police station? A school?

I've been thinking about that from time to time, too. And I think there might be a whole different reason for the lack of straight buildings that take up an entire baseplate, aside from 'using the parts for more details' etc.

My theory is:

It's not that easy to design a building that's a full baseplate wide, but has only three stories and that still looks good! Modulars usually have three floors, and if you built a 32-wide building with the average upper floor height of a regular modular (about 7 bricks, give or take a few plates), it would almost certainly look stunted.
That's propably why Green Grocer is so much out of scale compared to the other modulars. Same goes for Town Hall, which additionally has the tower. Our eyes are expecting a buildings width to be smaller than (or at the minimum equal to) its height, which on a 32-wide baseplate and standard modular scale requires 4 floors minimum. Due to optical fallacies, we also usually underesitimate the height of things in relation to their width (so we'll think that a building that is as high as it is wide  is actually wider than its height).
Fire Brigade also mainly works because it is built to a larger scale, and the tower may play a significant role here aswell.

PR and DD don't look great in spite of basically only being 24 / 26 studs wide, but because they are only that wide! Case in point, lots of people tried to convert the PR to a full 32-wide building, and if they didn't also increase the floor height or count, the result almost always ended up looking a bit stunted and thus not as good as the original (for anyone who did this and feels offended, no, I propably wasn't thinking of your version when writing this - and in any case, tastes differ )

This is also why the DO looks so appealing - just looking at it it evokes thoughts of a much larger building, one that might hold whole apartments on each floor of the blue side, for example. Which of course it definitely doesn't...

 

Also note that many MOCers go straight for four floor buildings, or resort to a larger scale, when doing 32-wide (or above). It just looks better if it's higher.

Edited January 18, 2020 by RogerSmith

[TheLegoDr]

I've noticed when I MOC buildings, I've been building closer to 24 wide buildings instead of full 32. But I hate having alleyways in every build I do. I can't ever justify cutting the baseplate to make it smaller.

Full 32 wide is definitely harder to come by because of the height. Too tall, it doesn't look right.  Too narrow, it doesn't look right. Always find that balance/ratio.

The bookshop looks decent for scale, but the townhouse is way too short for how it should look (IMO). But you can't straight double it up to make it look correct either. Who knows.

[ReplicaOfLife]

56 minutes ago, TheLegoDr said:

I've noticed when I MOC buildings, I've been building closer to 24 wide buildings instead of full 32. But I hate having alleyways in every build I do. I can't ever justify cutting the baseplate to make it smaller.

Why not use a 16 x 32 and a 8 x 32, or two 24 X 16 baseplates?  Though the odd sizes aren't available from Lego anymore through sets, they're still fairly easy to come by via BL or Ebay.

...or remember wrong what kind of baseplates you have and then just use two 20x14, like I did on Mike's Bikes

 

I rather liked the look of the Book Shop's town house when they doubled it up in the official designer video. Will have to do that to mine.

Edited January 18, 2020 by RogerSmith

[paupadros]

21 hours ago, RogerSmith said:

I've been thinking about that from time to time, too. And I think there might be a whole different reason for the lack of straight buildings that take up an entire baseplate, aside from 'using the parts for more details' etc.

My theory is:

It's not that easy to design a building that's a full baseplate wide, but has only three stories and that still looks good! Modulars usually have three floors, and if you built a 32-wide building with the average upper floor height of a regular modular (about 7 bricks, give or take a few plates), it would almost certainly look stunted.
That's propably why Green Grocer is so much out of scale compared to the other modulars. Same goes for Town Hall, which additionally has the tower. Our eyes are expecting a buildings width to be smaller than (or at the minimum equal to) its height, which on a 32-wide baseplate and standard modular scale requires 4 floors minimum. Due to optical fallacies, we also usually underesitimate the height of things in relation to their width (so we'll think that a building that is as high as it is wide  is actually wider than its height).
Fire Brigade also mainly works because it is built to a larger scale, and the tower may play a significant role here aswell.

PR and DD don't look great in spite of basically only being 24 / 26 studs wide, but because they are only that wide! Case in point, lots of people tried to convert the PR to a full 32-wide building, and if they didn't also increase the floor height or count, the result almost always ended up looking a bit stunted and thus not as good as the original (for anyone who did this and feels offended, no, I propably wasn't thinking of your version when writing this - and in any case, tastes differ )

This is also why the DO looks so appealing - just looking at it it evokes thoughts of a much larger building, one that might hold whole apartments on each floor of the blue side, for example. Which of course it definitely doesn't...

 

Also note that many MOCers go straight for four floor buildings, or resort to a larger scale, when doing 32-wide (or above). It just looks better if it's higher.

I strongly agree. For me, building 32-wides is really difficult. I remember when building my first modular MOC, Magic Shop, that I just didn't know how to fill the 32 studs on the ground level. More windows!? Arches!? . And mine was not as tall as TH or FB but thanks to its pointed tip and smaller windows on the top floors, I managed to make it seem bigger using forced perspective. That said, that was the first and last full flat façade modular. From then on, I either made the buildings have some variation (façades with protruding bits or curves) or straight out built two or more structures on each baseplate. Plus, completely on a personal note, the fact that a building occupies the full baseplate, takes away from us builders lots of tricks to make the buildings seem unique (eg. using a side façade to create extra depth, usign various buildings to complement one another...

[peedeejay]

Also took me a while to get the right balance on a 32 wide. My Pizzaparlor lacks height. So does my Tailor (but balance was already better). My first 32 wide with a balance that I am still comfortable with is my Casino.
I think 7 bricks high is not high enough for 3 floors (need 4 floors then). I usually use a 9-10 brick base floor and 8-9 brick upper floors.

[Creation88]

has anyone created a WANTED LIST for an extra story of the bookshop apartment? please share! 

[tunder14]

On 1/19/2020 at 1:12 AM, paupadros said:

I strongly agree. For me, building 32-wides is really difficult. I remember when building my first modular MOC, Magic Shop, that I just didn't know how to fill the 32 studs on the ground level. More windows!? Arches!? . And mine was not as tall as TH or FB but thanks to its pointed tip and smaller windows on the top floors, I managed to make it seem bigger using forced perspective. That said, that was the first and last full flat façade modular. From then on, I either made the buildings have some variation (façades with protruding bits or curves) or straight out built two or more structures on each baseplate. Plus, completely on a personal note, the fact that a building occupies the full baseplate, takes away from us builders lots of tricks to make the buildings seem unique (eg. using a side façade to create extra depth, usign various buildings to complement one another...

A couple thoughts. I always mod the set by adding floors or widening the building. Try using the golden rule, about 1.6x the other dimension to get something that feels right. Wider and short (1.6x wide as tall) or narrow and tall (1.6x high as wide) or a multiple of that such as 3.2. A 3 story building thats 48 studs wide looks ok to me.

I prefer buildings in that 5-6 story range - right at the limit for a stairs only building.

 

[CSW652]

On 12/11/2019 at 5:28 AM, imvanya said:

https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/bd37c50e-cead-44ce-8a6f-5c15c0967915 Looks like it is not a truck:

Objectively, one of the strongest entries, so the Grand Prize is well deserved.

So anyone figure out yet what modular this car is going to go with?

[danimarroquin]

A modular train station is a must sometime in this decade  ! With the addition of another old fashion train set similar to the emerald train set . 

Edited April 2, 2020 by danimarroquin

[legotownlinz]

25 minutes ago, danimarroquin said:

A modular train station is a must sometime in this decade  ! With the addition of another old fashion train set similar to the emerald train set . 

The modular buildings are not the ideal series for a train station, unless it is a huge station consisting of several modulars. But we know that Lego will not do that. A standalone train station is more realistic, a Creator Expert set would be nice but in the end I'm afraid it will be City again.

A Creator Expert train is overdue indeed. So far I withstood the temptation to buy a Bluebrixx train, but if there's no Lego train this year then I'll give up.

[meliander]

10265, 10264 out of stock on lego.com, not even on backorders. In US Walmart, Amazon, Target are cleaned up. Resellers jacked up the prices 2x. I hope once we get over COVID Lego will bring these sets back and not just decide to retire both. I am particularly worried about Assembly Square since I was hoping for it to go on Sale on Black Friday like they did for Parisian Restaraunt.

[autolycus]

6 hours ago, meliander said:

10265, 10264 out of stock on lego.com, not even on backorders. In US Walmart, Amazon, Target are cleaned up. Resellers jacked up the prices 2x. I hope once we get over COVID Lego will bring these sets back and not just decide to retire both. I am particularly worried about Assembly Square since I was hoping for it to go on Sale on Black Friday like they did for Parisian Restaraunt.

Same for me with Assembly Square, Diner, Roller Coaster and a couple other sets I want before they retire. It does say "Temporarily Out of Stock" for a LOT of sets right now. I'm guessing it's just a matter of the factories and distribution being slowed down. If they've made the parts, they'll want to package up the sets and get them sold eventually. Hopefully that will speed up in a few weeks and there will still be plenty of Assembly Square and others for Black Friday.

[AFOLguy1970]

33 minutes ago, autolycus said:

Same for me with Assembly Square, Diner, Roller Coaster and a couple other sets I want before they retire. It does say "Temporarily Out of Stock" for a LOT of sets right now. I'm guessing it's just a matter of the factories and distribution being slowed down. If they've made the parts, they'll want to package up the sets and get them sold eventually. Hopefully that will speed up in a few weeks and there will still be plenty of Assembly Square and others for Black Friday.

It is probably the limited capacity/workforce as you stated along with increased demand due to everyone being bored and stuck at home.  Some thing is true for Harry Potter as well.  

[LegoDW]

Well that disappointing if AS and CG are both going to be discontinued?

Hopefully demand will be strong enough for TLG to restock at least thru the end of 2020.

 

[westracing01]

Add 10270 to the list of "Out of Stock."

[LucyCol]

Lego.com UK has CG (10264) in stock, DD, BS, AS are all on back order which would suggest more sets are coming.

10265 Ford Mustang is also showing as back order

[The Brick Boss]

Hey guys! Get on here and support this Bustastic modular that my dude @bricksboy made. 

https://ideas.lego.com/content/project/link/b9b8dce7-0984-4045-89f8-c3a8fa067d13

[tafkatb]

I wouldn't read too much into what sets are on back order right now. Lots of board games and jigsaw puzzles are on back order too.

[meliander]

11 hours ago, LucyCol said:

Lego.com UK has CG (10264) in stock, DD, BS, AS are all on back order which would suggest more sets are coming.

I hope you are right!

That being said, it doesn't make much sense to me why some of these in US have Temporarily Out of Stock status and not Backorder if they are making more. Why can't they accept people's money if they are ok with paying now and waiting? Probably because the quantity they are going to make will only cover those backorders that have been previously made? It's a perfect way to retire a set - place it on backorder, gather those orders, and just make the exact amount and ship them. Instead of making more than needed and then doing a sale on them. I understand that these are difficult times for any business but a little bit of communication from Lego would be nice or at least hinting better of what they are going to retire and then so that people can make calculated and budgeted purchases instead of guessing and making impulsive purchases. Please correct me, somebody, if I'm getting this wrong :)

[bricksboy]

I have created a Bus Terminal modular building and submit to Lego Ideas. Welcome to support it if you like it :D

Ideas link:  https://ideas.lego.com/projects/b9b8dce7-0984-4045-89f8-c3a8fa067d13