A danish church designed by a danish architecte built with danish bricks

The building

For the last TechLUG contest, it was required to walk into the steps of Jorn Utzon by creating a building designed by this worldwide known Architecte for his Sydney Opera House. Scanning his creation, I found that this church is particularly interesting.

Indeed, when we consider the outstanding design of Sydney's Opera roof made with fractions of spheres, it is surprising that the same architecte designed also this church looking much more like an industrial building.

However, when one examines the interior of the church with its nicely curved ceiling, the Utzon touch becomes an evidence. For me, the ceiling profil looks like a see wave

but clouds were the source of inspiration of J. Utzon (in a church, are we not near the sky ?).

The link with Sydney's Opera and its roof cut into spheres becomes more clear when one consider this drawing

Where one sees that the profil find its origin into many arcs of circle like the Opera'roof and the ceiling of its main hall

Inside the church, the light is particularly impressive because it is canalized by the curved white ceiling

Finally, an aerial picture

This

, mixing real and virtual pictures, gives you a nice 3D description of the building .

If you want to see more about the church, I suggest you this pdf file and this one who analyzing the building in terms of additive architecture.

Finally, this diaporama allows to do a virtual complete visit of the church.

The goal of the construction

I think that you have understood that I want to include the interior ceiling into my MOC. This is clearly a building for which the interior is essential to get its architectural concept.

It is also well suited for such of construction because the ceiling is a single profil and the roof is made of straight plates : the whole ceiling/roof section being completed by the two very similar facades.

The idea is then to aloow to access inside the building by removing the rwo facades : the ceiling/roof section has then to be self standing without having to be supported by the facades. This represents the challenge of the MOC.

The version in lego bricks

I have started bu building the facades checking that the roof remains hidden by them, then I have built the base and finally the ceiling/roof section.

The facades with their glass roof have fixed the scale : indeed, for this roof, trans clear cheese slopes are the most sguited fixing the thickness of the facades to 2 studs. To built the walls of the facades, I have used a few hundred of 1x2 white plates with 1x2 grey bricks on top allowing to render their particular shape.

For the ceiling, I have mainly used arches, half-cylinder or various curved parts : for this, I had to build cylinder facing cylinder using hinges with 2 and 3 fingers.

The roof is made with tiles fixed onto plates assembled to the ceiling using 2x1 hinge bricks or by the couple

Le toit est constitué de pans réalisés à l'aide de tiles liés par des plaques fixés au montage par des briques plate with handle/plate with vertical clip.

The virtual MOC

First, a virtual MOC has been made and used to do this stop motion video showing the constructions steps .

The ceiling profil and the roof tof the virtual MOC

The real MOC

The base :

It includes some elements recalling that the building is a church like an altar, a baptistry and wide seats.

I have also included some element specific to this church like the corridor behide the seats which is a white grid inside the church and a brown grid outside which are represented by 1x2 vertical grid tiles and like the elevated space behind the altar delimited by white fences.

Without the facades :

The MOC is finally very stable and stands easily without the facades.

The two facades :

They include corridors in there lower section (made with panels two bricks high) to recall that they are mainly hollow and one includes the organ hidden by the brown panels

With the backward facade :

The complete church viewed from outside :

Jorn Utzon presenting his building :

Thanks for having read this long presentation and I hope you will enjoy this MOC.

Amazing building and amazing build. Your model is very accurate and gives the feeling of room. Very well done!

The roof/ceiling is an achievement, with all those nice curves, but I like the benches and the hallways as well.

Excellent work. It wouldn't look off in the Architecture line. Besides, you gave us the info from the booklet anyway...

I cant workout why this has only 1 reply it's fantastic. Perhaps it's in the wrong section of the forum....

When I was scrolling down I thought there's no way to many curves but then I saw it built and I was gob smacked. Well done on a very nice MOC and many thanks for sharing.

I thought I had posted how great this MOC is. Absolutely stunning!

Very interesting MOC and good work . I have never been in this church even though I live in Denmark, not fare away. But after I have seen your MOC, I want to see the real church too.

This is really good, DanSto. Great job carefully designing the roof of the hall (and the pews as well)! Fantastic work.

Thank you for such a detailed post! It really shows your whole thought process.

Thank you for the recent posts.

I cant workout why this has only 1 reply it's fantastic. Perhaps it's in the wrong section of the forum....

I thought that Architecture like MOC did not have to go to another section : the town section is more for minifig scale MOC, isn't it ?

Very interesting MOC and good work . I have never been in this church even though I live in Denmark, not fare away. But after I have seen your MOC, I want to see the real church too.

I would also have the possibility to visit it but I live to far from it.

This forum is not one I regularly visit, but after seeing this creation I will be returning!

What a great looking building and thanks for sharing the design process with us. It's sinuous and elegant and deserves to be seen by more.