Football Stadia represent the tribal Colosseums of the modern world. In their simplest form, they represent places where your tribal heroes don colours and fight it out with the opposition, in front of their supporters. Of course, we live in a far from simple world, and before long, the trappings of big business and high finance enter the fray.
In 2020, we have seen the Old Trafford football stadium as well as the Roman Colosseum released in LEGO form. These structures are similar in form and purpose, although the nature of the contests within may vary. Perhaps it is only appropriate that this year, as the LEGO Group release a 5500 piece version of Camp Nou, the home base for FC Barcelona, it has been designed by Rok Zgalin Kobe, who has been responsible for the majority of sets released with the architecture badge in the last few years, as well as the Colosseum.
Certainly this model features a part count in between that of 10272 Old Trafford and the 10276 Colosseum, and more blocks of colour than were offered in the Colosseum set!
The new LEGO FC Barcelona Camp Nou set is fantastically detailed. Features include the stands, pitch, team tunnel, media boxes and even the team’s coach. The score board also references the club’s momentous 5-0 win over rivals Real Madrid in 2010 and two of the stands proudly feature the “Mes que un Club” motto that is known by fans around the world.
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The appeal of a roller coaster is hard to deny: action, excitement, lights noise, adrenaline, nausea, terror and relief, in various orders. When we first saw the new LEGO® Roller Coaster Track appearing in the Joker Mansion last year, it wasn’t long before people began to speculate about how long it might be before we saw one appear in the Creator Expert Theme Park series. About eight months it turns out. I’m glad we got that cleared up. When the Roller Coaster (10261) was announced early in May, many people, myself included, were impressed by the build: a moving model almost always has more appeal than a static display. But it raised a number of questions: How easy would it be to power? How stable would it be? How easy might it be to draw inspiration for other Roller Coaster themed MOCs? And just how challenging would it be to build all those white pillars?
This year, we saw the release of the 10 Anniversary Modular building, the Assembly Square. This set featured plenty of callbacks to the previous modulars, with various colour schemes and other design cues. Now that we are entering the second decade of modular buildings, it appears that there are some changes afoot. Until now, many of the buildings have had the appearance of buildings dating from the 1920’s or 30’s and the Minifigures all featured the classic smiley face.
But we now enter a new era in modular buildings: the downtown diner is drawing cues from the Streamline Moderne style, a style that originated in the late 30’s, but continued to influence architecture for decades to come: a sleek building, with a tiled facade and smooth curves, and we have both in abundance here. In a break with previous modular traditions, the minifigures now have expressions (and the occasional moustache) on their faces, while their dress appears more representative of the 1950’s. Indeed, the pink cadillac and the Rock’N’Roll singer all but confirm that this is a bit of a jump into the future from our previous modular era. (Admittedly, the Brick Bank 10251 from 2016, featured a computer on a desk, as well as an espresso machine in the staff room – not a common feature in the past – certainly this would be the most anachronistic feature of a modular building to date.) Assembly Square feels as if it might also be from a more recent period in history, if only because of the clothing prints in use by the minifigures. Certainly, we are now entering a new era, with new architectural styles and new minifigure prints.
