I did this on my phone and measured the footprint of the main tower to be 184 x 134 feet. I can zoom into a specific area in the 2D view and hit the ruler icon to make a measurement. Not everyone is aware of this, but you can use Google Earth to make very precise measurements. The largest section is the main tower (as I call it) which spans 42 stories (floors 30 through 71) and I am going to use that to determine the scale of my model. The first step is getting the dimensions of the real building and here Google Earth proves to be very useful.Īs you can see from the 3D view in Google Earth, the Empire State Building tapers as it rises and there are 7 distinct sections that make up the building. Let me use the Empire State Building as an example – to show how I arrived at the 1/230 scale I ended up using for my model of this building. In fact, the scale I pick is usually the smallest one that would allow me to accurately represent the floor count and the window count of the original building. I try to find the sweet spot with my skyscraper models – a scale that is somewhere between the tiny scale used in the LEGO Architecture series and the huge scale used for the models you would find in a LEGO Miniland. On the other hand, using too small of a scale can force you to compromise on accuracy (probably more than you would find acceptable). But too large of a scale can also result in a massive, unwieldy model with a prohibitively high piece count and cost. The bigger the scale, the more accurately you can represent all the elements of the original building in your LEGO model. There is obviously a trade-off associated with scale. And so if the actual building is 100 feet wide, your model would have to be 1 foot wide or it would not have the right proportions (it would either look too skinny or too squat compared to the real building). Now, this 1/100 ratio applies to all the dimensions in the model – not just the height. So a 1/100 scale simply means that your model of a 500 foot tall building would stand exactly 5 feet tall. The scale is just the relative size of your model compared to the actual building – expressed as a ratio. The first step is picking the scale that works best for the model. I am sure some people can pull it off but this approach is clearly a hit-or-miss for many others (which is the only way I can explain all the models I have seen that are badly out of proportion compared to the real building).īeing an engineer, I tend to rely on a more rigorous approach based on math (very simple math as it turns out) instead of using just my eyes and intuition. What exactly is involved in designing a LEGO model of a real skyscraper ? I wish I had a knack for doing it by eye – intuitively figuring out how wide (in terms of studs) and tall (in terms of brick heights) the model needs to be just by looking at pictures of the real building.
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