Modular Building Sets - Rumours and Discussion

[badbob001]

The color scheme makes it looks like an alternative build of the Haunted House (the tall one).

 

Also not a fan of the statues in front of the windows. Maybe push back the whole building to the rear edge of the baseplate and use the additional space in the front to place the statues (in white) in front of the columns?

Edited October 30, 2023 by badbob001

[lomis]

This interview with the designer is great as there is a lot of great insight into so many different areas of the set.

[Westbrick]

You can see on the 1st floor there’s an exhibit with some medieval helmets, a mini forest hideout etc. 

Edited October 30, 2023 by Westbrick

[RichardGoring]

It looks good in that video 'in real-life'. The ground floor tiling is nice, and the details inside look delightful.

Bit of a shame that so many of the recolours for this are specifically for olive green. I would love to have seen some of the other colour concepts, if they did them. But presumably they figured it was best.

Edited October 30, 2023 by RichardGoring

[FrkW]

Got to say it's a nice touch that there seem to be windows behind the banners, making them optional. Honestly, it's grwing on me, not at all what I was expecting but I like it. Reasonably well stocked exhibits too. 

[Gnukan]

The dog with the dinosaur bone and the broken pottery from the exhibit are cute details!

[Nickbrick27]

First impressions: It looks really mediocre to me. It's really bland for a museum, which is supposed to be a pompous stand-out building in a city. It's just lacking details and interesting building techniques. The colour looks also off to me(works much better for the Parisian restaurant). And who the hell thought it was a good idea to put statues right in front of windows? That's just dumb. Lego really disappoints me with their modulars in the recent years. It doesn't seem like they put their whole heart and soul into these sets.

[Bartram]

disappointed by the colour choice - was expecting a lighter colour like tan/beige/sand but maybe that would be too close to the police station's colours

[hikouki]

2 hours ago, street87 said:

Well. I saw that, Brick Clicker posted a picture in Instagram of the new GWP that looks to be a Hot-Dog van.

Its really nice.

Looks nice, but why a food truck?

[mapimi]

The high res images means it’s growing on me too. If I’m not mistaken I spot a bathroom at the back of the first floor.

im a bit bothered by the « practical » aspect of the set, a 3 wide staircase seems not wide enough for people to go up and down. I know a wider staircase would have taken valuable space but feels small compared to the usual 4 wide Lego stairpiece.

Still thinking I’ll get the parts to add one floor which will give it the size it deserves.

[The Jersey Brick Guy]

Looks good. Another day one purchase for me. Happy to have been wrong with it coming out a month early. 

[hikouki]

3 hours ago, lomis said:

This interview with the designer is great as there is a lot of great insight into so many different areas of the set.

Very insightful. (I find it amusing how the influencer pronounces "history" LOL)

3 hours ago, Westbrick said:

You can see on the 1st floor there’s an exhibit with some medieval helmets, a mini forest hideout etc. 

I wish they had included perhaps Space, with a light bluish gray oxygen tank, or a different color altogether!

3 hours ago, RichardGoring said:

It looks good in that video 'in real-life'. The ground floor tiling is nice, and the details inside look delightful.

Bit of a shame that so many of the recolours for this are specifically for olive green. I would love to have seen some of the other colour concepts, if they did them. But presumably they figured it was best.

The designer said that all of the team had a unanimous decision about the color. The main deciding factor, it seems, is how it would look with the other modulars in the street. I wish they had somehow specified which ones they were thinking (perhaps it is just the JC and BH?).

Modulars are supposed to be positioned however you would want to design 'your' street. And in real life, many building colors may be decided based on the architecture itself, or the main theme of the establishment. I feel like a museum, if designed properly could give us a wow factor even with some muted colors because of the build. What instead stands out in this building is the olive green.

[Lyichir]

The set looks amazing to me!

I know the olive green color has been divisive, but I like the way it's accented by the dark tan and dark brown, and while it looks good for the exterior I especially like the look it gives to the interior walls (which feel appropriately formal for this kind of museum).

I'm impressed with it architecturally, the proportions feel nice and I like the way the front columns are designed to "split" when you separate the floors. The exhibits are cute—the interview with Tiago on his YouTube shows them off in more detail. Obviously the star of the show is the big dinosaur fossil, which does a good job of having both a dynamic pose and a realistic amount of reinforcement to make sure it can hold the pose.

The tree out front looks good to me and I like the colors. The dark grey bands remind me of metal braces I've seen on some trees in urban settings, which I presume are meant to help support the tree and direct its growth upward so that it doesn't become unstable in the future.

The roof of the museum looks great, and I especially love the skylights and the little alcoves for the trophy figs in the left and right wings. The proportions of the building allow them to use those 2x8 rail plates to good effect for the white entableture between the walls and roof.

Personally I'm a fan of the use of vinyl sheets for the banners on the front of the museum, coming from themes like Monkie Kid, Elves, and Ninjago where that kind of detail is more common. Since they are punched out of a flat sheet they shouldn't curl or deform, especially since they'll likely be packed in the same cardboard "sleeve" as the instruction manual (which will prevent them from being curled or folded inside the packed box).

[Murdoch17]

That curator looks familiar... wait a second, I've seen him before: Dr. Kilroy is BACK!

Now we just need an updated guy in a black top hat with a monocle and a hook...

(I NEED that Kilroy head for my updated Adventurers!)

[Archer]

28 minutes ago, hikouki said:

The designer said that all of the team had a unanimous decision about the color. The main deciding factor, it seems, is how it would look with the other modulars in the street. I wish they had somehow specified which ones they were thinking (perhaps it is just the JC and BH?).

He did specify that it wad those two specifically. It makes sense since they are what will be available to buy. I'm also not thrilled with the color but I do think they always want the most recent three buildings to compliment each other.

[BrickRally217]

The darn thing is hideous. Jamie Berard and his eye for color are sorely missed in the modular line.

To the set's credit, I'm not sure how much changing the primary color (to something more muted with color accents?) would even help it. A modular-style museum is a pretty good idea but maybe in practice it isn't. To me it doesn't look great on the modular street. Something like this needs its own campus, surrounded on all four sides by patches of green and trees. Not that you couldn't modify it and do that yourself.

The interior is really well done. The solar system display rips. And the technique for the stairs; what a great idea!

[snaillad]

First impressions are I'm a bit underwhelmed.

I'd hoped after the Jazz club this one would be a bit more exciting but I feel architecturally TLG is playing it very safe. The Boutique hotel moved the line on with an interesting corner design and gave us something we hadn't seen before and also a decent amount of a new colour to the line. Two relatively boxy and simple designs in a row feels a shame to me and an opportunity missed. If this is the successor to the largest flagship modular build then assembly square looks a more interesting, colourful and appealing build.

As much as the banners are a cool design, I feel like they've been added in the latter stages as the design probably looked a bit dull and lifeless until then.

As for some positives, the minibuilds of the solar system and the earths core are pretty nice. Staircase design I also like. Minifigures look good too.

I won't be rushing out for this one. See what next year brings!

Regards

 

 

 

[Aanchir]

16 hours ago, JintaiZ said:

I know not many people agree with this but what about Corner Garage? I thought the color choice was poor and it didn't have tiled floors...

Honestly, it's never made sense to me to think of tiled floors as implicitly better than studded ones. Tiles definitely work nicely for some types of flooring, like wooden boards, patterned carpet, or actual floor tiles of various materials. But for types of floors that AREN'T meant to have color variations or visible "seams" (like wall-to-wall carpeting or uncovered earthen/concrete floors), they make less sense to me than just leaving the studded surface exposed — especially if the material is also supposed to have a rougher texture instead of a smooth glossy finish.

4 hours ago, lomis said:

This interview with the designer is great as there is a lot of great insight into so many different areas of the set.

Yeah, after watching this I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants a better look at the interior details on each floor! It shows many of those details much more clearly than the official set photos on LEGO.com.

2 hours ago, mapimi said:

The high res images means it’s growing on me too. If I’m not mistaken I spot a bathroom at the back of the first floor.

im a bit bothered by the « practical » aspect of the set, a 3 wide staircase seems not wide enough for people to go up and down. I know a wider staircase would have taken valuable space but feels small compared to the usual 4 wide Lego stairpiece.

Still thinking I’ll get the parts to add one floor which will give it the size it deserves.

Yeah, the room in the back near the base of the stairs indeed a bathroom, as can be seen more clearly in the lifestyle video from LEGO.com (which I also recommend checking out)! The other room next to it seems to be an archival/storage room, with a spare pot, some bones mounted to the wall similar to the one the dog out front has nabbed, and also a smaller brick-built skeleton/fossil of some sort.

Stairs 3 studs wide are plenty big to allow a minifig to climb up or down. After all, it's the same width as all the stairs from Parisian Restaurant and Jazz Club (as well as the interior stairs of the Boutique Hotel and the Bookshop's townhouse)! A lot of the past buildings that had wider stairs did so by omitting railings entirely, which would probably look a bit lackluster for a stately building like this. I believe the Palace Cinema and Pet Shop were the only sets in the series that had four-stud-wide interior stairs with railings that didn't subtract from that width.

Of course, this doesn't leave much room for people trying to climb up and down at the same time, but addressing that generally tends to require much wider stairs in LEGO than in real life, since minifigs are so wide and rigid/inflexible compared to real people. In any case, it certainly beats the Grand Emporium's escalators… which had only two studs of width per stair, and also made it even more puzzling how minifigs could both ascend and descend unless the escalator periodically switches directions!
 

I'm surprised how many people are really put off by this set's color, considering how beloved the Parisian Restaurant was! Also surprised that many people find the architecture plain, since IMO there is lots of good detail there, at least in the front: a rusticated layer of sandstone on the walls of the first story, staggered bricks and arches framing the central doors and windows, decorative ornamentation around the windows of the two wings, and a stately dome.

Honestly, my main disappointment with the design is that the back is very plain, with the only textural detail provided by a few windows, a decorative architrave around the back door, and a single drainpipe. Obviously, the wall structure itself couldn't be changed too much without affecting the interior, but some crawling ivy or perhaps an old billboard could've helped to break up a lot of that flat wall space (along with some SNOTted rustication like in the front).

All that said, I realize this is a pretty common issue with modular buildings — the back is pretty much ALWAYS far simpler than the front, with nowhere near the same level of textural detail. The main reason it stands out here is that the back wall is so much wider than usual.

[Roebuck]

The interior looks better in the video than back of the box however where are the animal moulds in the exhibit?! All the natural history museums I have been to have plenty of stuffed animals, walls of butterflies and other insects. Was sure we would get that when I heard what the modular was, alas no. Are the budget for modulars that low? If we got this set next year a fun pun would have been to include a "stuffed" goat..

[Lyichir]

55 minutes ago, BrickRally217 said:

The darn thing is hideous. Jamie Berard and his eye for color are sorely missed in the modular line.

According to the interview video the olive green color was decided upon unanimously by the modular team, which IIRC is still headed by Jamie.

[hikouki]

1 hour ago, BrickRally217 said:

The darn thing is hideous. Jamie Berard and his eye for color are sorely missed in the modular line.

To the set's credit, I'm not sure how much changing the primary color (to something more muted with color accents?) would even help it. A modular-style museum is a pretty good idea but maybe in practice it isn't. To me it doesn't look great on the modular street. Something like this needs its own campus, surrounded on all four sides by patches of green and trees. Not that you couldn't modify it and do that yourself.

The interior is really well done. The solar system display rips. And the technique for the stairs; what a great idea!

If that food truck is the actual GWP, I think I will make a food truck park on one side, and then a MOC'ed botanical garden on the other side, followed by the Town Hall. I completely agree, this does not look well flushed side by side with other modulars. The only problem is, the sides are bare. The only decors that would work are more billboards. Crawling plants would not "pop up" because of the olive green walls!

25 minutes ago, Roebuck said:

The interior looks better in the video than back of the box however where are the animal moulds in the exhibit?! All the natural history museums I have been to have plenty of stuffed animals, walls of butterflies and other insects. Was sure we would get that when I heard what the modular was, alas no. Are the budget for modulars that low? If we got this set next year a fun pun would have been to include a "stuffed" goat..

This could have been an opportunity to feature new animal moulds... goat perhaps, which we are getting in the CMF and Medieval Village.

[Aanchir]

4 hours ago, hikouki said:

Looks nice, but why a food truck?

Not sure, but I suppose it does help compensate for the lack of a cafe here. In that regard, it fits better with this set than it would with other recent Modular Buildings that already came with some sort of food kiosk or eatery.

1 hour ago, Roebuck said:

The interior looks better in the video than back of the box however where are the animal moulds in the exhibit?! All the natural history museums I have been to have plenty of stuffed animals, walls of butterflies and other insects. Was sure we would get that when I heard what the modular was, alas no. Are the budget for modulars that low? If we got this set next year a fun pun would have been to include a "stuffed" goat..

Honestly, I kind of get it. The Modular Buildings have always had a lot of emphasis on creative uses of generic parts, so brick-built exhibits make a lot of sense for it in that regard. Moreover, fossils/skeletons of dinosaurs and other extinct animals tend to be some of the star attractions of any natural history museum. Whereas including a bunch of molded animals from still-extant species to represent taxidermy would risk it feeling less like "really unique/exciting museum" and more like "feeble substitute for a zoo".

38 minutes ago, hikouki said:

This could have been an opportunity to feature new animal moulds... goat perhaps, which we are getting in the CMF and Medieval Village.

I feel like goats (or any farm animal) would feel unusually mundane for a museum like this, and would only really be meaningful/exciting to us AFOLs. Plus, it'd get much less meaningful/exciting the longer the set remains on shelves, despite being really unique and novel when the set is first released. Casual adult buyers 3–5 years from now will probably have no idea what's so special about a goat that it needs an exhibit in a natural history museum. I mean, for comparison's sake, how many people in real life would plan a trip to a natural history museum to see chickens or cows?

Edited October 30, 2023 by Aanchir

[Ruthin Road]

It just looks a bit lacklustre and lacking in imagination to me. Like the town hall, the front facade is plain and lacks definition hence the somewhat unsubtle attempts to liven things up with the banners, tree and the window cleaner. The interiors and exhibits seem sparse and to lack refinement. The interiors are gloomy in colour. On the plus side, the simplicity of the design should make it relatively straightforward to modify both the building and the exhibits.

The extended footprint seems unnecessary. If the dinosaur skeleton was removed then it could easily be modified to fit on a standard footprint, which may also have helped create a building with more detail and flair. The bank and police station demonstrate you can have civic buildings on the standard footprint that still look sufficiently imposing, and part of the joy of the modular buildings, and of Lego in general, is seeing how designers are able to work within a limited size and piece count.

Unfortunately the museum does not justify the increased size. It continues an unwelcome trend of Lego creating ever bigger sets for, presumably, ever bigger profits.

Also, and as other have said, given the range of exhibits, why is this a natural history museum as opposed to just a museum?!

[RichardGoring]

4 hours ago, hikouki said:

Looks nice, but why a food truck?

It goes well with the Jazz Club to my mind. The moving truck goes well with the Bookshop/townhouse. The taxi was released with the Boutique Hotel, but also available again a year later. The GWPs don't always seem to fit directly with the modulars, but I'm glad we get them.

1 hour ago, Aanchir said:

Honestly, my main disappointment with the design is that the back is very plain, with the only textural detail provided by a few windows, a decorative architrave around the back door, and a single drainpipe. Obviously, the wall structure itself couldn't be changed too much without affecting the interior, but some crawling ivy or perhaps an old billboard could've helped to break up a lot of that flat wall space (along with some SNOTted rustication like in the front).

All that said, I realize this is a pretty common issue with modular buildings — the back is pretty much ALWAYS far simpler than the front, with nowhere near the same level of textural detail. The main reason it stands out here is that the back wall is so much wider than usual.

And it's made worse by being so wide. It definitely needs something. a load of ivy climbing up it will be pretty easy to do, but a shame they didn't do it in the set. The Parisian Restaurant did it, to break up the olive rear wall too.

[danimarroquin]

impressive set! love it, will be one added to my list for next year.