The Parthenon, of Acropolis in Athens, Greece.

Interpreted in Lego by Stefan Gustavson (LUGNet #2407) using MLCAD

With the Athens summer Olympics coming up, I thought it would be nice
to create a Lego version of Parthenon, the famous ancient Doric temple
for the goddess Parthenos Athena. The project started out in microfig
scale, with 2x2 rounds for the columns, but that design became much
too large for me to even think of building. The ruins of today do
not include the roof, so that would be reasonably easy to build in
microfig scale, but I wanted to recreate the entire ancient structure
as it looked when it was new. Therefore, I scaled my initial design
down to the smallest possible scale I could without sacrificing too
much detail, and the columns are now built by 1x1 rounds.

This small design is of course a lot less detailed than the actual historic
building. However, I tried my best to render what I could in this small
scale, and the general structure and the proportions are quite accurately
rendered. Proportions were very important design aspects to ancient Greek
architects. The integer proportions 4:6:9 appear everywhere in the real
building, and to some extent I have kept that in my Lego version.
The final design is still a pretty complex build with well over 1000
pieces, with lots of 1x1 rounds and 1x1 plates.

The model has reasonably accurate interior detail. All the main features
of the structure are there, to the extent that I could find references
on the Web, and the design opens up to provide a good view of the inside.

In this scale, the Athena statue in the middle of the temple (in
ancient texts reported to be about 12 meters tall) is approximately
the size of a minifig. The minifig Athena statue I placed in the temple
is of course not very accurate, but I did give her a golden shield
and made a feeble attempt at a microfig-size winged Nike in her right
hand.

The model was designed using MLCad and then built in real life, after
I shopped around for the parts I needed. This was my first real project
with the LDraw tools. The LDR file is more of a design sketch and does
not reflect the exact model in the photos. I found errors in the design
which I fixed in the real model, but not yet in the LDR version.
(The main error was that the model did not open up. A few studs in my
LDR version would actually have held it shut.)

Note that the colors in the LDR file are chosen for clarity rather than
realism. I had trouble finding good references to the original color
scheme for the historic building. If you know any good source for this,
please let me know. The actual model is mostly white, with other colours
where I couldn't find convenient sources for white pieces.

  Stefan Gustavson (stegu@itn.liu.se) 2004-06-23, updated 2004-08-04