This was short
leisure build for evening after completing Amunna. I saw the post with Andreas
Lenander’s Fat Boy rim and was though that maybe I could use it somewhere else
than only in the Tardis console… In a way it feels slightly cheating to build
parts festival builds inspired by parts festival builds, but hell, can you have
enough MOCs in the wide world of LEGO community? I was just hit by idea that it
might be possible to build Bramante’s Tempietto using motorcycle rim as the
balcony.
What
exactly is Bramante’s Tempietto? For me, it’s familiar from basic course of
history of architecture, a first-year course in my studies concerning history
of European architecture from ancient Greece to Guimard’s underground stations
in Paris. For our course exam, we had to learn to draw 40 important buildings
or structures – our professor said it would be faster to judge drawings than
read essays, and I think it was a fantastic task. One of the easiest was
Bramante’s Tempietto. Donato Bramante (1444-1514) was an Italian architect of
the Renaissance period. He was associate of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, moved
to Rome in 1499 and was commissioned to design a small temple – a tempietto –
on the assumed site of Saint Peter’s crucifixion. Bramante’s design was small
round building with two stories and dome roof, surrounded by one-storey Doric
colonnade.
Spontaneously
I wanted to re-create this simple masterpiece in bricks. Fat Boy rim defined
the size of the balcony, and 6x6 round plate felt natural base for the inner
structure. It also meant I could use 3x3 quarter-dome parts to make the roof
(though I had to borrow then in dark bley from another build). The first design
used 1x1 round bricks stuck into the offset antistuds of 6x6 round, but it
looked wrong, and I adopted very pleasant design with macaroni bricks stuck
into those offset antistuds, conclaves facing outwards. The design was
completed with the doorways and some SNOT on the sides.
The
colonnade proved to be much harder; the main challenge was to have regular
circle of sixteen bars! I don’t know if there happens to be perfect piece for
that, but I just ended up sticking them into a plate with some offset. It quite
doesn’t capture the round stairs of the original, but I think that would have
required a very complex design unsuitable for this spontaneous leisure project!
The colonnade also lacks three pillars (I only had 13) and they’d be more
realistic in light or even dark bley, but I had white ones and they were okay.
I also capped the model with Batman’s bowl piece. There should be a cross on
the top (it’s a Christian temple – Bramante went to design some parts of St.
Peters afterwards) but I had no idea how to make a cross that small, as LEGO is
not so keen on making religious elements. No idea why they had S. Marco and
Leaning tower of Pisa (the clock tower of the cathedral) on Architecture sets,
though…-Eero
