Escher's "Waterfall" 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.

Click on the picture or here for a
bigger version (about 540K)

Daniel Shiu and I worked on this as a joint project after we
finished our
rendition of Escher's "Relativity", making it our fifth Escher picture
rendered in LEGO. Yeah, OK, this time we cheated big time. You can find
out how we
did it further down this page. There are also details of some
of the more interesting construction features.

The original Escher picture (Waterfall, 1961.
Lithograph) is shown on the right for comparison.

How We Did It

OK, let's come clean. We actually resorted to photographic
manipulation for this one. The model as built has the right-hand tower in the
background. The water channels running from bottom left to top right are genuine
and connect the two towers as shown. But the channels running bottom right to
top left are actually only connected to the left-hand (near) tower. We took two
photographs of the model; one with and one without these channels, but from the
identical viewpoint:

The final image was constructed by very carefully overlaying
portions of the left image with the corresponding portions from the right. Yes,
it's dirty. We couldn't see how else to do it. Sorry.

Construction Details

To make up for the gross cheating, the model does have a number of
interesting construction details. Here are some highlights (click on the small
pictures for larger versions):

Here's an overall view, showing the genuine water
channels between the two towers and the false ones that lead nowhere. You
can also see some of the Technic framework used to support the raised
parts of the model.

The decorations on top of the towers were a bit of
a challenge. We spent quite some time trying various alternatives. In
fact, when originally planning this model, this was one of the big three
problems we thought we needed to solve (the other two were the overall
'impossible building' construction and the waterfall itself) In Escher's
original picture, the object on top of the left-hand tower is an
intersection of three cubes. I couldn't quite manage that in Lego, but
with judicious use of roof pieces (lots of 1x2
double/inverted slopes, 2x2 corner
slopes and 2x2 double
concave slopes), I did manage to construct an intersection of three
cuboids. Close enough. Escher's other tower is topped by three
intersecting octahedra. I just wimped out here and hacked together
something vaguely geometric-looking. Both of the lego constructions are
achieved by joining together six identical constructions on the faces of a
cube. Oh, the uses for those1x1 bricks with
studs on the sides...

The garden in the Escher original has some pretty
weird plants in it. So here's a slightly unusual use for Technic bendy
tubes and rocket engine pieces...

This little staircase was a bit of a challenge. It
was hard fitting enough steps into the limited space available in the
model. In the end we used half-brick spacing, using an obscene number of
yellow 1x2
jumper plates in the process. The problem is that inevitably there
will be a half-stud gap somewhere. I had just enough jumpers to hide it
away out of sight...

There are two interesting features in this
picture; the waterfall and the roof of the millhouse.

The waterfall itself was about an evening's work. I started by writing
some C code to model a gradually widening parabolic arch with random
variations for the spray (hacked from the code I use for my mathematical Lego
sculptures) and then gradually modified it by hand until I liked the
look of the result.

The roof was originally constructed with standard slope bricks, but we
wanted to model the rough tiled look of Escher's picture. The general
construction is blatantly stolen from a roof construction method I had
noticed at Legoland Windsor, though I simplified it a bit for this model.
The entire roof is built of brown plates, and pretty much exhausted my
collection.

The washing line. Well, we thought it was cool
;-). The line itself was temporarily borrowed from a large pirate
ship...

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. In particular they have a "virtual ride" through "Ascending and
Descending".

All other pictures on this page are Copyright © A. Lipson 2003.

LEGO ® is a trademark of The LEGO Group, who have
nothing to do with this or any of my other LEGO-related web pages.

Our other LEGO renditions of Escher works are "Balcony", "Belvedere" and "Ascending and
Decending" and "Relativity"
Back to ASL's home page
Back to ASL's LEGO page

FAQs and contact
information

Hits since 1st May 2003:

Powered by counter.bloke.com
This
page last modified 1st April 2005