After about a month or so of nightly research, planning, building and rebuilding, and two days of rushed photo-taking (racing home after work to try to take pictures before the sunset), I am proud to present my latest work, The Getty Center.
The Getty Center is my entry to the EuroBricks.com Architecture Building Contest which has recently concluded.
My entry finished in 5th place (netting me a Brandenburg Gate!) which I am both proud of and humbled by. The competition was stiff and many of the entries were not only remarkable, but could very easily be actual LEGO Architecture sets should LEGO choose to produce them.
This definitely was one of the hardest LEGO challenges I've come up against to date. Not only were there issues with scale, feasibility (with LEGO bricks as a medium) and layout, but I had to do some major editing, image searching and plenty of corrections as well.
I started with an aerial view of the Getty, rotated it to meet my needs and added a grid for reference. As I started the build, I quickly realized that I was somewhat over my head given the time constraints of the competition. I ended up omitting the central garden of the Getty Center, an area that is probably as iconic as the architecture of the Getty Center itself, in order to focus on the courtyard and produce the best representation I could at the scale I was working with.
Much of my time (I'd estimate a good 40% of the build process) was spent on the Arrival Plaza that, aside from the Tram, is the first notable experience that visitors would have of the Getty Center.
I started out with a self-standing model that later was modified and put in place on the base once I had figured the proper elevation levels I was going to build the model at.
Figuring out how to build each building in relation to the ground was actually what caused me so many headaches through this process. The Getty Center is, after all, built upon a hill. There were many points where I thought I had the build executed correctly, only to discover a new picture of the actual Getty Center which said otherwise, necessitating that I undo all my work to carefully start over again from the ground up.
Despite it definitely not being to scale though, I am happy that I was able to pull this off, mainly due to smart planning. I spent so much of the building process simply staring at pictures and trying to decide the best mathematically-based approach to make everything line up to at least give a good representation of the grounds.
I'm sure I probably could have made a better effort of it had I actually got to visit the Getty Center sometime during the build process, but the timing of the contest and other factors just didn't allow that.
Still, I am very happy with how everything turned on under the circumstances. Part of me is also considering continuing the work to include the other parts of the Getty Center that I never got to work on.
But I'm definitely going to have to take a break before I do so. And there are other projects that are not only calling my name, but I actually had to borrow pieces from to complete this project.
Thanks to those who've supported me in this effort, to those who voted for me, and thanks for reading!
