While the official worldwide release of the LEGO Architecture Shanghai (21039) building set won’t be until January 1st of 2018, residents of the city in question will already have a head start in acquiring this superb example of brick building design. LEGO stores in Shanghai and in Shanghai Disneyland will have already started carrying set 21039 since Saturday, December 2.
To those who need a refresher, LEGO Architecture Shanghai (21039) replicates six well-known structures in the iconic Chinese port city. Four of them are veritable skyscrapers, the tallest of which is the unique Shanghai Centre Building with the twisting shape.
If you’re curious as to how the twist of the Shanghai Centre Building was translated into interconnecting LEGO bricks, the mechanics were revealed online by builder NateV, who posted screenshots of the building process for the skyscraper, of which the real structure is the third tallest in the world, behind only the Tokyo Skytree and Dubai’s Burj Khalifa.
LEGO Architecture simply needed to copy the building design for the Shanghai Centre Building, which are actually nine building segments stacked atop each other. As seen above, the ground-level structure is a base for support pillars wherein the flat blocks representing each of the 127 floors is then threaded and stacked. Every boundary of the building segment is represented by a light-colored brick.
After the floor blocks are stacked, the builder only needs to twist the structure to replicate the actual building.
It’s an impressive mechanical design that will surely fire up the imaginations of anyone buying the LEGO Architecture Shanghai (21039) building set, whether in Shanghai now, or later globally at the start of the New Year.
