The Plummer Building...
Susan Wachtal...
Our initial planning was based on some architectural elevation drawings provided by Susan and some photos from the web. Later Stein and J1 both took trips to Rochester and provided much better photos.
We build several footprint models at various scales to get a feel for how the building would map to the brick. We considered scales based on windows. Making the windows two bricks wide resulted in a footprint of roughly 64x64 studs and a height of several feet. Four-wide windows led to a footprint of roughly 128x128 and a height of over six feet. We also did some rough calculations of the number (and cost!) of bricks these sizes would demand.
I lobbied for the smaller scale; the larger scale seemed, well, too large and especially too expensive. J1 lobbied for the larger scale with his usual "the bigger the better" argument. In retrospect, I'm glad we used the larger scale. The details at that scale mapped very well to bricks. With 50% smaller dimensions we would have had to cut a lot more corners on the detail, and the detail is of course what makes the building interesting.
With the scale settled we continued to refine the footprint models. J1's was something like 144x144. Mine was something like 126x107. (Yes, I considered using an odd width but eventually got the ideas of odd-width windows and half-stud offsets out of my head.) We also had a debate over whether the building was really square or not. J1 took a road trip to Rochester and paced it off - sure enough, it was rectangular. We eventually settled on a footprint of 128x110 studs.
For the design phase the building was more or less divided into four parts:
I updated my ancient copy of MLCad and started modeling a version of the repetitive floors (3-9). I made sub-assemblies that could be repetitively copied. This made it easier to change things efficiently and also made it easier to build in modular chunks that could then be snapped onto the main model.
I moved upward to the more complex windows of floors 10-11, then worked on the border above the 11th floor. In the meantime J1 was working on an MLCad version of the upper tower. By the time I was done with those, I'd spent several weeks of "late night time" (10PM-3AM). Time was running short with respect to ordering the bricks before the event so I quickly modeled the borders above the upper rectangular stories. The borders contained most of the detail and non- standard bricks, so were the most important to aid in figuring out which parts to procure.
J1 began ordering parts from BrickLink and buying cups of tan Pick-A-Brick bricks from the Lego Imagination Center at the Mall of America. He reported that the LIC-MOA employees got to know him pretty well. We also gave Jake at Lego an initial "want list" of about a dozen types of basic bricks that we needed in bulk.
Besides the obvious design considerations, the other reason for my MLCad modeling was to generate a reasonably accurate list of the needed parts. I'd like to thank Dan Boger and Travis Cobb, both of whom helped me with utilities to generate accurate parts inventories for complex models with lots of sub-assemblies. Hopefully this capability will make it into MLCad and other mainstream tools.
Once the MLCad models were far enough along to get a meaningful inventory I started a spreadsheet of needed parts, plugged in what J1 had bought so far, and began placing additional BrickLink orders. By this time it was within a few weeks of the event and I appreciate the sellers for their speedy responses and especially those who got to handle my multiple order additions. Two of the orders didn't arrive until the day before I left for Rochester but they all came through in the end.
We also were anxiously waiting to see if Jake would be able to help us with bulk bricks from TLG. We got final commitment about two weeks before the event and the bricks arrived a week before we left. Whew!
We also any additional parts we thought might be useful from the GMLTC parts collection. Being able to draw on such a depth of parts made it far easier than if we had had to plan out every last brick to be able to specifically order them.
Stein, Conan and Abner build a platform to build the model on. They glued and screwed two sheets of 3/4" plywood together, put large wheels on the bottom, and glued grey baseplates to the top. The whole thing needed to be portable so the wheels made it rollable and also left room to get forklift forks underneath.
We also grabbed the "usual" non-brick building supplies: rubber mallets, "beer openers" (brick separators), extra tackle boxes and trays for parts dispersal, utility knives, etc.
The Rochester birthday party event was open to the public from 11AM-6PM on Friday and Saturday and 11AM-5PM on Sunday.
We began building on-site around 9AM. Builders during the first day were J1, Abner, Stein, Michael and I, and J3 showed up late in the afternoon. Since Stein, J3 and I had kid(s) along we were in and out to take care of them, so we weren't at "full force" all the time.
It took us a while to get going laying out the footprint on the baseplates. The building, oddly, only has one door which is in a two story tall section adjacent to the main building footprint, and adding in the extra space for the doorway section required some extra fiddling around. We ran out of time and didn't end up doing any preliminary design work on these first two stories and they were hence the slowest part of the build. It took us from 9AM to about 7:30PM to build the first two stories - considerably slower than anticipated, to put it mildly.
During the first day we also had kids and other passers-by help by building "windows" that would be snapped into floors 3-11. We needed about 700 of the things, and the kids gladly obliged us - by the end of the day we'd run out of black 1x4 bricks and had more windows that we needed. The kids, of course, seemed to like helping.
After the event closed down we finished up the first two stories and went out for dinner. Later that night several of us came back and worked on floor 3 - the first tan layer. Floor 3 was the first of the repetitive floors that had been designed with modular components. It took us a while to get into the groove of building the components and assembling them into the model, but it really helped to be able to build things in a standard way for floors 3-9. If we'd done it ad-hoc we wouldn't have been able to have passers-by help with building the components (starting on Saturday) and would have had to do all of the building on the actual model.
Most of started again around 9AM, although J1 showed up around 5:30AM (nut!). Everyone was there from the previous day and Conan also joined us.
Francis and Collette (?)
We started again around 8:30AM with Steve, Stein, J1 and Abner. Our most oft-answered question of the day was, "Are you going to finish it in time?"
Bob
I, frankly, had no idea what to do except to keep working. Around 1AM J1 and Stein more reasonably concluded that we needed to shut down and return to finish it another day. We packed up and finally left at 3AM Monday morning. I got home at 5, slept a few hours, and went to work where I was totally useless. J1 at least had the sense to stay home that day.
The delay before finishing the building gave me a chance to do some redesign work on the upper floors. I had not thought through that part as well as the work we'd completed up to that point, so the delay was very helpful in that regard. Some Lego builders are able to work very spontaneously but I'm not one of them. I reworked substantial portions of the upper window sections that Abner had built in Rochester (the rework was no fault of his since the original design was mine too). When we went back I was confident in the layout of the upper floors and was much more prepared than had we finished at the original event.
There was a diagonal crack along brick seams on one of the inside front (east) walls. The worst part was that a brick had actually popped out (a black 1x4 from a window). The forklift jockey might have been a bit rough, or more likely the platform under the model flexed more than we anticipated. ...
Brick modding
Window decorations
Completion - the tower goes on!
The model is on display in the lower lobby of the Siebens Medical Education Building at Mayo Clinic. They plan to move it to several locations over time, such as the children's hospital, and perhaps eventually put it on display in a yet to be completed museum area.
Update: December 2004 - it's been reported that the model is no longer in the Siebens Building lobby, but we don't know where it is now.
This project came together because of a rare mix of circumstances:
We cannot stress enough how much we appreciated everyone in Rochester. The event organizers who worked with us, especially Susan Waughtal, were extremely enthusiastic throughout and very gracious in accommodating both our last-minute commitment to do the project and our inability to finish the model during the public event.
Mayo Facilities - tour