Century Tower
For this project, I wanted to do something else besides a mosiac. Stuck on the college theme, I stuck with a building that should look familiar to anyone who's been to UF--Century Tower.
Instead of working on a mosiac, I wanted to do something more 3D and somewhat interesting. With the neo-goth style architecture on campus, I figured this would be much more fun than one of the dorms (yes, this would be fun to put a lot of upset students outside at 2am yelling at their LEGO RA because someone pulled the fire alarm).
Being able to make enough detail without worrying about TOO much detail, I thought mini-fig scale would be fun--making the tower about three feet tall. I was also thinking about putting a sniper on the roof (for those who have seen the movie Parenthood should know what I'm referring to), but I decided hold back on that for now.
The bottom has three doors and a bench built into the tower that The most difficult part was getting the photos of the bottom of the tower (I live in Pasadena, 2400 miles from campus). So I had some help from some friends in Gainesville (Thanks Larry and John, who has a killer gallery of the tower). Once I had those (and figured out which picture pointed which direction), I was able to build the bottom.
The bench faces the north side. There are lots of cool plaques and plants around the tower, but I won't work on that until I'm ready to work on University Auditorium. University Auditorium is the really pretty building you see next to Century Tower in the photos.
For fun, I added a carillonneuse (the person who plays the bells) to the ground floor. Unfortunately, this is not technically accurate--as the carillonneur has to walk up about 200 steps to play the bells. I'll fix this later on, when I'm working on the landscaping.
The legend is that whenever a virgin graduates from UF a brick falls from Century Tower. Anybody walking by can see that Century Tower stands tall and complete to this day. Contrary to the legend, you'll notice the bricks on the ground. Those are all fell out of the tower for the virgins who graduated.
If you want to see the work in progress, take a look at my folder on Brickshelf.