Discussion: Why do you build Town?

[Hinckley]

I'm not really sure building Town creations is so much a choice as it is something engrained somehow in our genetics. May as well ask why you like the color blue. There's no answer, you just like it. But that driving genetic force aside, what is it about Town building that keeps you coming back?

I like to see the little City Center I'm building grow and I love the challenge of adding more and more architectural detail to my buildings. IRL, I miss seeing classic stone architecture and think the age of the beautiful art deco and stone skyscrapers is sadly over. Mies Van der Rowe buildings and glass/steel structures have replaced the artistry I appreciate in architecture. I like to celebrate the best of classic architecture in my work and put it all together in one place. I like having that little metropolis that I built on a table in my room.

So what are your thoughts on Town/City building? Do you build urban creations, suburban, rural, neighborhoods? Do you prefer Industry, vehicles, ships, trains? What makes it your preferred theme?

[prateek]

I think Town is so appealing because it reflects our daily lives and what we see in society everyday.

I usually build residential buildings and vehicles, since I like to look at the designs of homes and cars.

[Rick]

Thanks for starting this Hickley: a really nice idea for a topic. I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's opinion on this. It really gets you thinking about why your favorite theme is your favorite theme...

I know that Town has always - already as a kid - been my favorite theme. I think it's the realism that you can achieve that attracts me to it, that you can build your own little world while taking inspiration from everything around you. Trying to capture essential real-world features of a building, a car, a truck, etc. and abstracting away from the less important details, on a much smaller scale is the ultimate challenge I guess.

I'm also really glad I'm an AFOL now that TLG releases the realistic modular buildings (which I consider to be part of Town) and I can luckily afford to buy them. Buildings like these were always kind of dream when I was a kid, but these sets would almost certainly have been out of reach for me...

[escortmad79]

I prefer town as it's true to life & you're unlimited in the creations & ideas you can come up with.

I have a sheet of A4 paper with various ideas scribbled on for when I get around to creating my own Lego town layout.

With things like space, pirates etc you are somewhat limited in what you can create.

Town is what I played with in my childhood & is what I've chosen to play with in my second childhood!

[WesternOutlaw]

Interesting topic and discussion Hinck.

I've always liked building LEGO town/city since peering into toyshop windows as a child and seeing everyday life in miniature layouts (LEGO, Playmobil, HO-scale Trains, or other life-like renditions set in a miniature scale). I like the bright colors of Classic Town with lots of red, blue, and yellow bricks, plus the small little parts (aside from standard bricks) used to make them more detailed. As a child, I had building contests with my family and we always seemed to build houses, something I find standard to LEGO (since they are normally square/rectangular like the brick we've all grown to love).

I can't seem to limit my LEGO building to one single house/building, but rather I like to expand to create towns, with roads, vehicles, and trains. That's what Town/City is all about.

Again, great topic, and I'm very interested in reading some of the other views.

[lightningtiger]

Originally it was just for kicks, but now I have a name for my town, a name linked to my families past, a name going back to 1840, that being Mannum. It is about 60 km's east of Adelaide S.Aust. on the banks of the River Murray, which is part of the Murray-Darling River system which is one of largest in the world.

My future MOC's will revolve around town life and river life - yesterday for me was a first - a ride on the P.S. Industry, a 99 year paddle steamer - it was cool !

MOC's to be comming will be a small airport/helicport, speed boats with water skiers, more shops and stores, a few things I'll keep under my hat until I have done them - hopefully they will blow everyones minds as they will be different and you may not have seen them done in Lego before !

[curtisrlee]

I like arranging sets already made my LEGO and MOCs together to make a small town to play with! Yes I PLAY with my LEGO sometimes

[Steel Dragon]

With things like space, pirates etc you are somewhat limited in what you can create.

I personally disagree, but I'm sure none of us are here to argue, so I'll leave it be.

I don't consider myself a "classic Townie", but I pick up Town sets and build Town MOCs because they set a good backdrop for Zombie/Post Apoc MOCs and dioramas. The main reason I want Town Plan is so my little plastic survivors have a home base.

So I guess in a nutshell, I build Town to break it down!

[Grrr]

I think one of the key things about town building is that you can start out small and expand. It's a little different from say a pirate diorama where it seems 'incomplete' unless there is at least one ship (which you might not have owned as a kid).

More recently I've struggled more with town building due to scale issues. The Modular buildings and 6-wide trucks are a bit big to go with the classic sets. Consider the size of 3180 vs 6683. For that reason I've been buying second copies of many classic town sets to enlarge them, and building four wide truck equivilents to modern trucks.

[AllanSmith]

About 1985 when I started buying LEGO I decided I couldn't afford all the the themes so I settled on Town and Train. I have bought nearly every town and train set since then. I always wanted to build a train layout like you see in other scales (HO, OO, N, etc). Due to lack of space I can only build these layouts when I display at a show. Maybe one day I will have a pernament layout. I also build train and vehicle MOC's and a few building MOC's.

[Legoist]

I'm not really sure building Town creations is so much a choice as it is something engrained somehow in our genetics. May as well ask why you like the color blue. There's no answer, you just like it. But that driving genetic force aside, what is it about Town building that keeps you coming back?

I like to see the little City Center I'm building grow and I love the challenge of adding more and more architectural detail to my buildings. IRL, I miss seeing classic stone architecture and think the age of the beautiful art deco and stone skyscrapers is sadly over. Mies Van der Rowe buildings and glass/steel structures have replaced the artistry I appreciate in architecture. I like to celebrate the best of classic architecture in my work and put it all together in one place. I like having that little metropolis that I built on a table in my room.

So what are your thoughts on Town/City building? Do you build urban creations, suburban, rural, neighborhoods? Do you prefer Industry, vehicles, ships, trains? What makes it your preferred theme?

"City" sets are my main interest only because Trains are my true main interest, and Trains include everything around the railway: houses, shops, parks, construction sites can all be part of a railway layout. I prefer cargo trains, so industries would be perfect, but with the sets and pieces at our disposal is currently easier to build small villages than cargo centres and maintenance buildings.

Normally anyway I like rural or suburban stuff, not "city centres", and I generally prefer small builds with details rather than making gigantic builds. For instance, I have no particular interest in the modular buildings, even if I agree that they look fantastic. I never bought any, and if I do in the future it'll be mostly to use their pieces for something smaller.

Vehicles are cool for me (although we probably have too many), as long as they aren't oversized. I like 4-stud-wide cars, and 6-stud-wide trucks since all our trains (at least for now) are 6-stud-wide and it makes no sense to have trucks bigger than trains. I passed on some cool sets of last year such as the Dozer and the Harvester because they were just too large for our tastes. I kind of like ships but it's a bit harder than the rest to allocate them with Trains, and most of the ships in sets are not fun to build due to their 1-piece hull.

[Reaper052]

I have a small town that I hope to someday expand enough to make taking pictures of it worth it. Mostly I think it makes a good backdrop for my minifigs. Minifigs, in my opinion, give Lego mocs and sets a lot of character so having a place for them to live is great for me. The people that currently reside in my town include a one man band, a homless man, some gas station workers, and a number of animals.

Reaper052 :skull:

[legotrainfan]

When I was a child, I was a castle fanatic. On my Christmas wishlists there were many sets of the late 80s and beginning 90s. I loved the Middle Ages. You can't imagine how many times my forestmen deceived the knights. I loved playing with the forestmen figs. My fantasy was working well, and that's what you need for scenarios taking place in the Middle Ages.

In 1991 the 9V train series started, and that's when I slowly changed my focus. Trains and town are two themes that are, in my opinion, inextricably interlinked. I can simply use Legoist's quote to describe what I mean:

"City" sets are my main interest only because Trains are my true main interest, and Trains include everything around the railway: houses, shops, parks, construction sites can all be part of a railway layout.

Thanks, Legoist. You formulated precisely my own opinion.

[Ricecracker]

Someone else said it best,

"I have always loved Town building. It’s not unlike an addiction in that there’s always another building to create. Different and better than the last one."

I think one of the reasons I love it so much is because I see all these things in my daily life. I can go outside and be like, "Oh, I just built that!" I think that I also find it enjoyable because I can, in theory, be more accurate with my MOCs. Anyone can build a fire station, but not everybody can build one down to the last detail.

[Ralph_S]

^ I agree that building things you see around you is a big part of the fun in building town.

For me it's not my favourite theme, BTW. The things I like to build most are military airplanes. For a long time I didn't build town at all and gave up on minifigs completely, feeling they cramped my style. Then, in 2007, The Brickish Association had a competition for their Christmas get-together. It involved building a cafe-corner compatible building with a Christmas theme. Since my experience in celebrating Christmas in the UK at that time was limited to having an office Chirstmas party at an Indian Curry House, that's what I built; my first building and my first minifig creation in at least a decade. I had so much fun doing it and building two minifig cars to go with it that I kept it going since. I too keep adding bits. It made walking through the town I lived in in the UK much more interesting, because I constantly found myself looking at buildings and vehicles wondering how I could build them. By now I've built half a dozen buildings, a park, and several dozens of minifig scale cars and I have even built a train (the first in at least two decades). A factor is also that town models always go down very well at public displays.

Cheers,

Ralph

Edited January 4, 2010 by Ralph_S

[Zorbas]

I think that everything stems from our childhood and the things that impressed us or made us interested even subconsciously. Being a child, you always want to do things that a grown up does and by using LEGO that could be achieved to some extend.

Another thing that made me a Town builder/collector/nutter was that I could have unlimited ideas- something like a chain. You build something and then you can build something else that can be used with the first and then something else for the second etc. For example, a cargo ship. Then it goes like this:

Cargo ship-harbor-crane-cargo train wagon-cargo station-truck-gas station-tanker truck etc. You get the picture.

During this chain, there are always smaller or larger additions and details included in the chain's rings as you progress.

I like the bright colors of Classic Town with lots of red, blue, and yellow bricks,

Right at the point TheBrickster.

A very important factor for me too. When I was a kid, space sets were either blue or later white. Castle were grey. Town was a canvas of all the colours together. It just made you feel happy only by just looking at the sets and layouts.

Even now...

[Bob]

Interesting topic.

I suppose that I build my city because I've always loved town sets. A bit over a year ago, my town was this;

A crappy apartment building, one creator set, and a grey building on the beach. Now, after almost a thousand dollars in bricks, It's still a Work In Progress.

I built that town a few months after I joined Eurobricks, with very little skills when it came to the Brick. Now, about a year later, I'm proud to call the second picture my current town. With all the skills I've learned from other MOC's, and other tips and tricks from along the way, I've been able to put together better buildings. Before, I used to get in close with the camera, to make it seem like I had more of a city, and now I had to stand back in order to capture most of it.

That cabana that you see by the beach I visited several times during a vacation in the Bahamas. The Grocery Store all the way in the back I designed after one I saw about an hour away from where I live. I was inspired by the other creations I've seen here to actually build that town. It's now however, that I wish that I didn't spend all my money on Lego Star Wars, when I could have gotten different Town Sets.

I also like the 'real life' factor that comes with Town Sets. The Nautical Sets that came out in the 90's provided hours of fun, as well as the Diver Sets. When I didn't like the set anymore, I'd break it, and build it into something else. That was the beauty about the Town Sets, with Space and Star Wars, you needed complicated directions. With Town or City, it would be a house, then a car, then a boat.

With Town Sets, you could act out a story that someone could relate to. You couldn't do that with many other themes.

[Svelte]

Town will always be my first love

I appreciate and enjoy everything from old Classic Town buildings to the very impressive modular series. There have been topics on this in the past, but I don't think the old open-back classic sets are at all incompatible with the new larger buildings. Some AFOLs don't like these because they think they're not really in scale, but have they looked at a real city lately? Even the largest modular building would still be dwarfed by its real-life counterpart.

Like Hinckley, I appreciate older architectural styles, and like Ralph S, I really enjoy wandering around 'translating' in my mind beautiful old buildings into their LEGO counterparts - even if I never have time to build as much as I'd like.

Colour is very important to me as a builder, so we've been amazingly lucky to get great parts in beautiful colours in recent years. I remember when I first started coming out of my dark ages in 2003-2004, the only sets where you could really get limited quantities of doors and windows were in Harry Potter. The 4886 Building Bonanza released at the end of 2004 was a real turning point in terms of LEGO aiming to please building afiocionados.

It's great to see that designers are slipping new parts and colours into non-City sets (like the medium blue windows in Toy Story) and expanding this palette. The 5891 Apple Tree House is probably one of the most beautiful and well colour-coordinated sets I've seen in recent years, too. People have complained that it is too small but the size is just right for a medium sized house in comparison to the modular series (The 2009 6754 Family Home was just awkwardly scaled with those giant shutter windows as large as old style doors used to be).

The idea of Town is really distilled as an idyllic neighbourhood - it's the place you want to live in your dreams...

[Col. Brik]

Town is my preferred choice because it can reflect real life or a imagined one you would like to see. Trying to recreate things you see everyday is also a bonus for me. Granted, looking at our City/Country layout in my household it really stretches all themes of LEGO but if you look at it in a general sense it is very "Town" based in its structure.

[MetroiD]

When I was a small kid growing up in a relatively small city (albeit the second biggest one by Bulgarian standards), I just loved the "city" itself. Not that specific one - rather, the concept, the feeling of a "city". It's not a feeling one can describe, although Stevie Wonder and Undercover, off the top of my hat, have actually done quite a good job of capturing it in melody (Living for the City / Baker Street). The urban jungle (laaame, I know, but it sounds right) has always drawn me and has offered me a weird way of exploring the outside world - checking just how much I fit in as a cog in the city. Surely the wheels would still turn without me and the streets would still be full of life, but finding out that you also contribute to it all every day, just by walking out, just by roaming those streets, was definitely a thrill. I still remind myself of that fact sometimes and it somehow makes me feel nice.

I've lived in many cities since then, including some of the biggest European metropolises, and have come to appreciate the unique atmosphere which each and every city and its people, buildings and streets are able to create. I guess to me, the city is more than just a place I live in and an urban area, the disadvantages of which I have to put up with on a daily basis (don't we all!). It's a living, breathing entity, and having the ability to recreate that in LEGO bricks and brand it "My Own Town" is simply amazing.

I've wanted to build an "AFOL" tabletown layout for so long now, and I'm sure that one day us Otters will start work on a never-ending project which will fulfil that dream of mine (which has meanwhile become a common goal :) ). The great thing is that until then, I can still picture the corners of "my own town" and take out the brick boxes whenever I feel inspired in order to recreate some little bit off the streets that surround me in the real world. That, to me, feels more magical than any knight or fairy... or mecha.

[Hinckley]

I've always liked building LEGO town/city since peering into toyshop windows as a child and seeing everyday life in miniature layouts (LEGO, Playmobil, HO-scale Trains, or other life-like renditions set in a miniature scale).

I never though of this with way. LEGO is an accessible way for people, kids and adults alike, to build mini-metropolises without knowing a ton about math or having access to tools, materials, etc. Plus building towns with LEGO improves an understanding of geometry and matrix reasoning.

[radar92]

I build town to make my own bit of Germany. I spent about 3 yrs there and enjoyed it greatly. I normally go for industrial rail with a harbor. I recently expanded the train table and now also have a urban area also.

I have also done 1850 generic using the soldiers for a army post.

I seem to make a radical change every year. So far it's been flipping between 1850 and modern times.

I also enjoy doing the research for it. An old model RR catalog I have from Germany helps the search for information greatly.

[wooootles]

I'm a skyscraper and architecture fan, but I don't want to major in that area. Plus, I wanted to be a tyrant mayor without having to deal with real-life politics.

So, LEGO will do for me.

[Hinckley]

"I have always loved Town building. It’s not unlike an addiction in that there’s always another building to create. Different and better than the last one."

That's a very smart man!

[Piranha]

City and Town have always been Favorite theme.

I collect, build and enjoy discussing it.

I like City because:

- It reflects the world we live in

- Building styles and techniques that it involves (architecture)

- Allows for endless expansion to layouts, designs and setups

- It is just plain awesome

Edited January 4, 2010 by Macoco