Bramante's Tempietto

 Yep, the Parts Festival is still on. This was the last build I made for it, but there are still few to come... This is Bramante's Tempietto, based on realisation that I had used Fat Boy trims on one build only. Also the first build posted here on 2020, the new decade! Hooray! Thanks for Tim and Elspeth for organizing, here's longer version of the text written for NE, with more trivial on history of architecture.

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