built these two buildings for New York Family Magazine’s April 2006 cover. Photos by Jennifer Lee

The white building is about 2 feet tall, and the red building is about 2 feet wide. The white building was mostly modeled after Cielo Condos, a Manhattan high-rise that is featured in the magazine. Because I was on a tight timeframe, the buildings are not glued (Gluing takes much longer!) Each building took about 1 full day to design and build, and they use about 6,000 LEGO elements between the two of them.

To give a realistic look to the windows, I used clear LEGO bricks with opaque ones located immedately behind them. This gives the windows a bit of sheen and a bit of depth, but does not allow your eye to see through the entire building. The white building uses completely clear bricks with blue behind them, and the red building uses blue-tinted clear bricks with black behind them.

The children, Lena, Jason, and Jackson, were super cute and a lot of fun to play with! I brought a large tub of random loose LEGO elements to the photoshoot, and while one child was busy being photographed, the others would come over and build with me. At one point while all three were being photographed, I popped up over the photographer’s head, wearing hot pink LEGO sunglasses and talking on a blue LEGO cellphone. Of course, the kids were all giggling and no one was looking at the camera at this point, so I had to slump back to my chair and behave. :)

Two other scans from the magazine: (click to enlarge)