At some point one of the most fun ways to find new ideas for Micropolis is to pick a city and pull up Google Street View or an equivalent and go for a virtual tour. While I was taking a look at Saint Paul, Minnesota I ran across the CenturyLink Tower and found inspiration. I don’t often try and replicate a building as precisely as this attempt, but the form of the building lends itself incredibly well to LEGO.

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Sometime in 2012 the kids in the household discovered the television show Phineas and Ferb and became quite enthralled by it. Thankfully, like all good animated television, the writers for the show make it work on many more levels than their pre-teen target demographic and since then I have found it to be quite entertaining as well. Enough so that it occurred to me in January of 2013 that the iconic headquarters for the evil mastermind in the series would make a fun addition to Micropolis.

I secretly think of this as the Zebra Building. When I built it I wanted to make one of those buildings where the parking and entrance was underneath the raised-up building. I managed that part, but I’m not sure whether I like the design of this building or not. I think if I had to do it over again I’d make it a more complex shape. Maybe I’ll rebuild it someday.

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Just to cover the obvious: Yes, those are large headstones. However I couldn’t figure out a way to represent them in any smaller parts, and I think put together like they are it works pretty well without necessarily being the most realistic representation possible. The two mausoleums on the back part of the property seemed like a nice way to break up an otherwise very open module. I’m fairly proud of the technique used to set the headstone section into place using lots of clips under the fencing.

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Clikits was a LEGO line marketed to girls in the 2000s. I have very mixed feelings about the LEGO products aimed at girls–though I love the new Friends sets–but Clikits included parts that are unlike anything else LEGO has made. I was looking for a way to incorporate these pieces into a micropolis build and came up with this building. Since then I’ve used Clikits parts in several other buildings, but the Clikits tower is still my favorite.

St. Paul has a wonderful children’s museum where we spent a lot of time when the kids were small. My Children’s Museum doesn’t look anything like it, but I did get a few ideas for the details from the St. Paul building. I’ve always had mixed feelings about this build. On the one hand it was great fun to build–I got to use bright colors and clikits and trans crystals and huge (for Micropolis scale) animal statues out front.

Back in late 2008 one of the members of TwinLUG, Roy Cook, was commissioned to build replicas of the Minnesota State Capital building and Cathedral of St Paul for the Minnesota Historical Society. At the December 2008 TwinLUG meeting he proposed a contest to see who could make the best miniature version of either building that could be used as templates for mini-models that could be sold to help make back some of the cost of the projects.