Some of the same caveats apply here as with the movie reviews: if you find the idea of assembling 1700+ little plastic pieces into a model to be boring, then this is probably not for you. There’s a certain suspension of disbelief that is required for model-making of any kind, and especially for pre-made models like Lego. In this case, the final result is not quite two feet high and (within the constraints described below) quite detailed.
I first encountered Lego circa 1970, in the form of a large box full of bricks. They were almost all the same height, and almost all the same configuration: smooth sides, bumps on the top, and sockets for bumps on the bottom. The colors were random, mostly white, gray, and primary colors. Two by twos (square in plan with four bumps on top) and two by fours were the most common, there were also a good number of one by twos and two by threes. There were a small percentage of other items – wheels with an attached axis block, one by ones, blocks with 45-degree sloped tops, and half-height pieces with large plan areas – but nothing that could be called figurative. There were no people (minifigs, in Lego-speak), no animals, no plants, no doors, no windows, nothing molded to look like a piece of a building. This appears to simply be the result of my parents having bought the toy a few years before the company expanded from making plain bricks to making kits. I’m saying this not to say I was deprived as a child – I spent many, many hours building with those bricks – but simply to say that playing with my son now has been a different kind of experience. The Empire State model would have been unimaginable to me 40 or 50 years ago.
This model is typical of modern Lego kits. Most of it is built up of half-height pieces specially shaped to provide interlock, to make it something other than a stack of bumpy pancakes. Here’s the base of the model, representing the first floor storefronts and the adjacent sidewalks. (It’s sitting on a tray we used to be able to easily move it while working; the plastic dishes were used to sort the pieces as we worked.)
There are two themes that kept coming back to me: a combination of close attention to architectural detail with a glossing over of reality. In this case, the black projections are the storefronts and canopy of the real building, nicely done. The taxis are ridiculously crude and overside and, in my opinion, unnecessary. A more subtle error is that the west side of the building (on the right above) is treated identically to the east. The east side faces Fifth Avenue, the west faces a mid-block lot line. The tower facades are identical above the fifth floor setback, but the bottom of the west facade is a blank wall. Here’s the base, encompassing approximately the first dozen stories:
The actual building is pretty much different shades of gray on the exterior – the striped light-tan pieces are the model’s representation of the facade – but Lego helpfully used bright colors at the hidden interior to differentiate pieces. This picture shows some sloped pieces at the interior – for example, at the left side of where the tower meets the five-story setback roof – that are either inexplicable or are supposed to represent escalators in the lobby. Once the model is complete, none of that is visible. You can also see two other aspects of the model that are considerable improvements over my old brick-on-brick assemblies: using bricks in non-standard positions (like the upside-down bricks at the top) to create more continuity; and using blocks with bumps on the side to allow bricks to applied turned 90 degrees from the ordinary orientation. The bumps on the side are how the facade segments are attached and in the case of the areas shown here, how vertical subassemblies are added. Speaking of subassemblies: here is a group of typical floors:
The smooth inset panel on the left is a flat piece held between bumps above and below and appears to be a miniature shear wall to keep the sub-assembly square. And here’s four of those assemblies added to the tower:
(A side note: Kiki the parakeet usually has free run of the table, but she has a tendency to try to eat small, brightly-colored objects, so she had some cage time during building sessions.) Lower setbacks added:
This is a good example of model logic over-riding reality. Obviously the building frame was constructed form the bottom up, so the setback areas were in place before the tower. But the model is, conceptually, a central core with pieces added around the outside. Here’s the narrow (east and west) facades of the tower added:
Then final lower setbacks:
There are a number of times that the instructions require making two or four identical pieces. You can do so however you choose; in homage to the assembly-line nature of the actual construction, we tried to work on the same stage of each of the identical pieces at once. Putting the new pieces in place:
Hey, look: it’s the elevator core.
Another difference between model logic and reality is that the facade needs to be applied in these discrete pieces, which are something like three stories high. This creates a visual rhythm from the edges of those pieces that doesn’t actually exist. It’s jarring at first but you eventually get used to it.
The building is essentially 86 normal stories with a big thing on its roof contains more stories, mechanical equipment, and other random things:
There are trade-offs in using Lego. You get a somewhat unrealistic facade and simplified details. On the other hand, constructing a model like this from, say, balsa, would be much more difficult and take months of evenings. This model was the right amount of work and looks good, particularly from a few feet away. Getting the details more accurate would mean increasing the scale and I’m not entirely sure I want a six-foot model of the Empire State.
Five stars, would build again.
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