Chrysler Building

THE BUILDING

With its exquisite metal crown and spire piercing the skyline, the Chrysler Building is the other crown jewel of New York City (along with the Empire State Building). It makes quite a statement with its highly ornate exterior – adorned with metal ornaments that recall the hood ornaments used on Chrysler cars. When it was built in 1930, the Chrysler Building became the tallest building in the world, but it held that title only for a brief period of time before it was surpassed in height by the Empire State Building. It then remained the second tallest building in the world until the late 1960s.

THE MODEL

The most recognizable feature of the Chrysler Building is its famous stainless-steel crown made up of terraced arches that taper upwards and culminate in a spire. As I started working on a LEGO model of this building, I realized that it didn’t matter how well the rest of the model turned out if the crown wasn’t convincing. I ended up making freehand sketches of the crown (to roughly the right scale) on LEGO graph paper (which has a grid showing the correct proportions of LEGO bricks and plates from a side view). These sketches helped me figure out what curved slope pieces could be used to approximate the curvature of each of the arches and how all these different pieces could be joined together (using elements like brackets and bricks with studs on their sides) without leaving any gaps.