Escher's "Balcony" in LEGO®

Because The LEGO Company get paranoid about this
sort of thing let me make it clear that I have no affiliation with them, that my
views are my own and do not necessarily represent theirs, and so on. So if you
think any of this is official you are as deluded as they are.

I'm very fond of Escher's work, and I wondered for some time
whether it would be possible to produce a plausible rendering of any of his
pictures in LEGO bricks. Well...

My friend Daniel Shiu and I worked on this intermittently (one or
two nights a week) for nearly three months. The model occupies a tabletop, about
4 feet by 5 feet, excluding the blue sea plates which hang over the front. The
townscape only looks good from one direction - it's an elaborate facade, held up
by scaffolding behind, as you can see in the pictures below.

A significant part of the problem was figuring out exactly what
distortion Escher had used to blow up the centre of the picture; firstly because
we wanted to "undistort" the picture in order to be able to copy the townscape,
and secondly so that we could transform our final photograph into something that
looked like Escher's print. I tried several different ideas before I found one
that produced plausible results. An unfortunate side-effect of the
transformation is that the resolution suffers in the middle of the picture,
where it's expanded by a factor of four. I'm using a 1.3 megapixel camera, and
our initial results didn't look too great. Our eventual solution was to take a
number of separate shots, zooming in on distinct parts of the model, and glue
them together as a mosaic panorama. The image above was constructed in this way
from 16 images. The final Escher transformation was implemented in a custom C
program that I hacked together.

We were also rather constrained by the size of the model and the
rather tightly defined position of the camera relative to it. Getting a
reasonable picture involved considerable furniture rearrangement, some Very Very
Careful shifting of the table bearing the model, much climbing over banisters
(the table currently blocks the top of the stairs leading to the attic where the
model resides) and, eventually, painting a chimney out of the picture's
background.

The shadows don't look right, of course. If pressed, our excuse is
that we made the model at a different time of day than Escher made his
picture!

I'm quite pleased with the dome - and I finally found a use for
the blue ball that appears in LEGO
set 8269!

If you like this, you might also enjoy our LEGO rendition of
Escher's picture "Belvedere".

The early stages of construction...

Guess who just bought a bunch of grey
bricks

.

Around this stage we started believing that it was going to work,
but progress slowed down as more and more of our time was spent
constructing scaffolding for the buildings which are to be built
higher up

Daniel starting work on the cathedral building which appears at
the top of the finished picture.

The rocks at the base of the picture. My first use of the new
sand red bricks (I had just come back from a trip to LEGOLAND
Windsor with a couple of packs).

Close-up of the dome.

The finished construction - but photographed from the wrong place
so you can see all the ways we
cheated.

Behind the facade...

The dome's internal
construction.

And finally, a view from the side, showing the elaborate
scaffolding.

All M. C. Escher works (C) Cordon Art, Baarn, the Netherlands. All
rights reserved. Used by permission. The
official M.C. Escher web site is worth a visit.

All other pictures on this page are Copyright © A. Lipson 2002.

LEGO ® is a trademark of The LEGO Group, who have
nothing to do with this or any of my other LEGO-related web pages.
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This page last modified 1st April
2005