Sunday, September 11, 2022

Surfin' the web in Totally Normal Town

 The Internet Café and co-working space is one of my favorite buildings in Totally Normal Town because it's one of the few buildings that is completely original and not at all inspired by commercially-available sets.

It has a lot of really cool details and design elements that work -- making it a fun building unlike anything you'll see in a typical Lego city.

When we first started rebuilding the city, we decided that we needed a nice place for our minifigures to surf the Internet (since that's what people do all day), so we set down a bunch of desks and computers (plus a coffee machine). Then Nico started building a wall all the way around the outside.

I really didn't want to have such a big building surrounded by a solid brick wall, though, so I gathered up a bunch of arches to make the outer walls entirely open windows.

Then, to make the wall/windows more interesting, I attached a bunch of neon-orange claw-like pieces kind of represent lights.

Since the building has such a large footprint, and since the interior is fun and interesting, I wanted to ensure that it stayed visible by keeping everything open. So, as with the walls, I created the suggestion of a glass roof by putting beams across the top, aligned with the irregular corners in the original footprint that Nico put down.

And I had some of the beams go up into a pyramid shape to give the impression of a dome, plus I added more little neon orange lights along the top.

(To be precise, the coffee machine is from a set, but the building is not.)

The building has three doorways and lots of minifigures busily working inside, including some friends from the Muppets and Harry Potter.







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