Staggeringly Amazing Church of Lego

rcharbon writes: "This link brings you to yet another of the web's compulsive personalities. Almost 18 months in the making, the lego church is astonishing. Christened as a monument to dead cats, no less." I know we post Lego things often, but this is an amazing project from Groundbreaking ceremony to completion. I was especially impressed with the mosaic works. The artist also has a number of other Lego works to check out while you're at it.

Comments

Correct Link

[samael]

Do you not check those links?

You should be going here: http://www.amyhughes.org/lego/church/

Text from the main page & one picture

[thesolo]

Since it is already slashdotted, here is the main page. I managed to grab one overhead of the church, you can see it here

"This project is dedicated to my cat, Precious, who passed away January 8, 2002, the same day construction was completed. May this church, of such amusement to My Little Chirper, express some of the joy she brought me.

"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you" Philippians 1:3

About this project

I got back into LEGO building after a twenty-year "dark ages" as a means of dealing with grief after my first cat, Murray, passed away in June, 2000. I also adopted Precious, my third cat, at that time. She loved to be amidst my building from the start. She didn't disturb partially assembled LEGO objects, or even piles of bricks, so I only had to concern myself with cleaning up loose pieces when I was done working, and I could leave her to play around my assembled work without too much fear of damage.

My first project was to be a large house, about 4 feet by 2 feet in size. I drew floor plans, and then built much of the front wall as a test of concept. Then I set about creating a pattern for the floor that was to become the living room. I quickly came up with a double row of crosses that reminded me of the center aisle of a church, and building a church suddenly seemed like a more interesting project.

And so the Abston Church of Christ was conceived as my first LEGO project in twenty years. As the picture above shows, Precious continued to enjoy my building, and as you'll see in the Cats in Church pictures, she and her sister, Anya, made this project quite a lot of fun. Read about it in the construction log.

As chance would have it, I only had a few hours of work to complete after Precious passed away, so in her honor I wrapped it up that same day. I didn't have a chance to do some small revisions or to build a piano for the church because I wanted to leave it as it was on that day.

I hope you enjoy this church, because that's how I get to share the memory of My Little Chirper with you. I like to think of this as Precious's Church. "

Honestly, this is an amazing project, but the site gives me the creeps for some reason.

Re:Slashdotted!

[thesolo]

I mirrored a few, here you go (be gentle!):

1) Overhead of the Church
2) The Altar
3) Lego Priest giving a sermon
4) Lego Organ Pipes
5) Her cat, Precious, inside the church (you'd think laying on legos would be uncomfortable!)

Should I be amazed or afraid?! :P

To go along with it beautifully...

[DrEldarion]

Check out The Brick Testament

Complements it quite nicely.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Re:To go along with it beautifully...

[markmoss]

Slave = black only in the special circumstances of American history. Biblical slavery was not race based -- mostly the slaves were war captives, although sometimes a criminal would be auctioned off to raise money to compensate his victims, or a bankrupt debtor might be sold to pay the creditors. So a slave might be a foreigner, distinguishable by accent but often not by appearance, or might even be a former neighbor.

The problem was, if a slave looked like free people, he could escape fairly easily. So in the American south, bondservants (white people who paid for their passage by agreeing to a limited period of slavery) would all too often simply walk away and take up land of their own out on the frontier, but africans couldn't travel even a few miles without showing papers. In other countries without a frontier, non-racial slavery worked better, but there were still problems in the long run. If slaves were used on a job, free men were reluctant to take wages for the same work -- in the antebellum south, there were poor whites that would be happy to take a job "overseeing" the slaves, but would rather eat clay and grass than pick cotton themselves. So in the long term, most societies evolve to either be mostly slave or mostly non-slave. E.g. in Medieval and Renaissance France, a poor man wandering the countryside was obviously a runaway serf. In England serfdom died away, then African slaves were imported for a while, but by the late 1700's slaves were so rare that it was easy to ban slavery entirely. However, in the Arab nations in the same period, only very important persons and desert nomads were free -- and when the Turkish empire extended from Bulgaria to Africa, legally _everyone_ was the Sultan's slave.

church stats

[e1en0r]

from her site: It contains approximately 75,000 pieces, including almost 4000 windows, seats 1372 minifigs and is about 7 feet long by 5 1/2 feet wide.

Ob. Grammar correction

[mattman]

For the (hopefully) last time:

Lego is the plural of Lego. Lego is the company. If you must add an 's', use "Lego bricks." The bastardization "Legos" grates on any true fans nerves. Please don't use it.

Re:Ob. Grammar correction

[wadetemp]

As you've stated, the LEGO(R) trademark is an adjective not a noun. A LEGO(R) legal page has more information about this, under "Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site."

Another mirrored image

[piranha(jpl)]

Here's another image I've mirrored for the few people that will see this post. It's looking down the main isle, to the front.

I'm not karma-whoring, honest. If I am moderated up, well, I'm on a 33.6 and I could very well be Slashdotted worse than the original host of this web site. =)

I've been slashdotted

[amyhughes]

The site actually has a pretty fat pipe, but traffic started to spike a couple days before slashdot even got the story. It looks from emailed comments and the web log like it's being discussed in email, "online journals" and other forums. Traffic has been doubling every day. Would it have survived a slashdotting a week ago? I dunno. I'll get a fatter pipe before I announce the next project :-) In any case, when the server comes back up there'll be no church pictures for a while. Amy

Re:I've been slashdotted

[amyhughes]

try here

Re:The site is still down...

[space_kadet]

The church site (amyhughes.org) is down for the count. I over-stayed my welcome
at my previous host, and now I'm looking for a fatter pipe. My needs are
variable, and pretty extreme on the upper end (but nothing like BS, BL, etc)...

My normal traffic has been about a half gig per month, but I think it's going
to be in the 2-4 gig range for the forseeable future, with peaks of 2-4 gig per
*day*, about once per year for a duration of a few weeks. Summary: 4 gig/day
peek for a few weeks per year, 4 gig per month normal traffic.

My storage requirements are more modest - perhaps 50 meg.

I need all email addressed to @amyhughes.org domain routed to me, regardless of
address. I currently have access to procmail for mail sorting and don't want to
lose that capability.

I'd like to be able to control URL re-direction based on referer, and I know
how to do this in Apache, so I'd like an Apache host. I'll consider other,
working alternatives, but my requirements are...

1) prevent other sites from inlining my images
2) block links from some sites, using regular expressions or something similar
that is just as flexible

A Linux box running Apache meets all these requirements, provided the host
gives me access to procmail, directory-level htaccess and the apache rewrite
module.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Amy