In this week’s Throwback Thursday we’re going back to another skyscraper model and our LEGO® brick model of the world’s 2nd tallest building- the 632m tall, 128 level Shanghai Tower!
Apart from the sheer height of the building (over 3m in the 1:200 scale that the entire Towers of Tomorrow exhibition was built in) the toughest part of this building was its unique shape- a kind of spiraling guitar pick that twists and shrinks as it goes up!
The building is so tall it features wind turbines in the top levels to generate its own power and a huge spiraling water collector on the roof for gathering water from the clouds to then water the internal gardens of the tower:
Ryan achieved the building’s shaping by using nearly 5,000 hinge plates and over 25,000 trans-black 1x2x2 window panels that twist by a stud or so ever few centimetres up entire height of the building.Each of these twisting outer window layers is then attached to a cylindrical central tower core by long plates which you can see at the top of the below picture:
The bottom of the tower was no less complicated, featuring a horizontal oval tube that wraps around the base and required even more hinge plates.
The Shanghai Tower is a permanent part of the Towers of Tomorrow exhibition, now on tour around Australia!
Watch Ryan talk about building this incredible building:
