Read time: 11 min.

LEGOs are more than just colorful plastic bricks; they’re a ubiquitous and cherished part of childhoods around the world. Since their introduction in 1958, these interlocking building blocks have transcended generations and cultures. A couple years ago, I decided use them to design a Muncie skyline.

I’d been a big fan of LEGOs as a kid, but I took notice as an adult in 2016 when the company released its Architecture Skyline series. I started with the brand’s miniature model of Chicago, and it wasn’t long before I’d bought and built them all in a series of frenetic binges.

One day, my brother mentioned how hilarious it would be to make a Muncie skyline done to Chicago scale. I agreed! The tallest skyscraper in the set measures a scant seven inches tall, so Muncie’s tallest would need to measure less than an inch. I laughed, then filed the idea away.

I discovered LEGO Digital Designer and its advanced companion BrickLink Studio in 2020 while I waited for new models to be released. The apps let me build and design models with virtual bricks, and my brother’s Muncie skyline suggestion popped back into my head. 

I decided to start by designing a micro-scale Fort Wayne. After three hours, I’d finished a model that used 543 pieces and measured about five and a half inches tall. I shared it online and got profiled in the print edition of the Fort Wayne Business Weekly newspaper.

Some on Facebook complained about the size of my model. I enjoyed the constraints of designing in micro-scale, but I eventually created a larger version that used 11,885 pieces and measured twenty-two inches tall! That one landed me an interview with evening news anchor Dirk Rowley of WANE 15, the Fort Wayne CBS affiliate.

That’s when I started my LEGO Muncie skyline. After many hours, the result was a gargantuan model that used 24,696 pieces! If it were ever built, my LEGO Muncie would measure nearly two feet tall, three feet wide, and eleven feet long. The bricks alone would have cost about $7,800!

My finished model featured buildings that were interesting, that represented a variety of colors and styles, and that would be simple to replicate in LEGO with advanced techniques. While LEGO bricks typically get stacked atop each other like regular blocks, I employed a different strategy called SNOT, or “studs not on top,” to connect them sideways and upside down. After several revisions, I finished a set of seven buildings that used the minimum amount of pieces necessary to achieve what I wanted aesthetically in a manner that could be securely replicated in real life.

The first model I started on was the AT&T Building, the tallest building in downtown Muncie. The original iteration of the structure was two stories tall and housed Muncie’s central telephone office¹. A 100-foot microwave tower was added to its roof in 1965², and the present tower was built five years later to enclose the structure’s convex microwave antennas³.

I designed my LEGO AT&T Building around a skeleton that used stacked columns of 1×2 bricks. I integrated bricks with studs on the top and side at strategic intervals to let me anchor 8×16 plates to the framework like a curtain wall. I used the SNOT technique to build the structure’s paneling out from its skeleton with jumper plates. Inside, I used LEGO Technic Liftarms and ball joints to create a torsion bar I anchored to the model’s base to provide stability.

I decided to tackle Cornerstone Center for the Arts next. Designed by Cuno Kibele, Cornerstone opened as the Muncie Masonic Temple in 1926 after six years of construction⁴. The six-story Gothic Revival edifice was once reputed to be the largest York Rite Masonic Temple in the world⁵! Cornerstone is a bulky, blocky building. To my model didn’t wind up looking like a big, red rectangle, I paid particular attention to its roofline and projecting bays to ensure my model was recognizable.

Recreating the building’s tower and crenelations was straightforward, but the projections were problematic: it’s ironic that Cornerstone’s widest points are around its corners. I designed them to extend the width of a full 1×1 brick from the model’s first two floors. From there, the walls narrow between pilasters that retain the width of the initial stories. I used jumper plates to set them back by half a brick’s width. Unfortunately, that meant the back of the model was half a LEGO too wide to be covered by the roof! I hid the gap with 3×4 slope bricks that replicate the building’s solar panels.

The next model for my skyline was The Lofts at Roberts. The steel-framed Colonial Revival building, once Muncie’s most luxurious hotel, first opened in 1921 and features dark brick veneer with contrasting limestone trim. Hotel Roberts was sold in 1961, 1972, and 1974 before it closed in 1983, seemingly for good⁶. Despite that, the seven-story building reopened as the Radisson Hotel Muncie in 1987 after a $10 million renovation⁷. Years after it closed again in 2006, the building was remodeled into senior apartments.

Aside from techniques I used to represent its medallions and scrollwork, my design for the Hotel Roberts employed conventional methods. Unfortunately, I ran into the scale constraints of LEGOs: Cornerstone is about twenty feet taller than the Roberts in real life, but my models came out about even. I almost fixed it by making the model’s mezzanine half as tall, but the change upset its proportions and I left it as-is.

I started on Ivy Tech’s George and Frances Ball building next. The $17.2 million structure⁸ was completed in 2019 and hosts the college’s culinary school, chocolate laboratory, and administrative offices⁹. I added it to the LEGO model because it was new, modern, and vastly different from anything else I’d included.

Nailing the building’s look depended on how I recreated the front of it. The problem was that the thinnest 1×1 brick was too wide to use for its skinny window frames! The solution involved sandwiching white plates between thicker translucent layers to create its windows and ledges. I rotated the entire assembly ninety degrees, fit it in the front columns like a puzzle piece, then anchored it.

The Muncie Civic Theater was next to join my LEGO Muncie. The building is part of Boyce Block, built in 1880. The structure’s western bays were remodeled into the Star Theatre in 1904¹⁰, and the establishment reopened as a movie theater called the Hoosier in 1935. The Hoosier Theater remained in operation for another twenty years¹¹. The Muncie Civic Theater began leasing the building 1961, and it’s been home to the organization ever since.

I truncated the Boyce Block to only focus on its Civic Theater portion. I used masonry blocks for the building’s bricked-in windows, jumper plates for the pilasters near the stage, and SNOT techniques for the marquee and ornamentation. I approximated the decorative ironwork around the theater’s roofline with “Plate Special 1 x 1 with Tooth” pieces connected backwards to headlight bricks. Unfortunately, I ran into some scaling issues inherent in the world of LEGO that made the building seem nearly as tall as the Roberts and Cornerstone. In real life, it’s nowhere close.

I failed at LEGO versions of Muncie’s Carnegie Library, the Heath Iron Building, and Rose Court before I decided to try my hand at the F.T. Roots Building, home to the Fickle Peach. Built by Francis Roots in 1895, the Queen Anne structure originally housed a wholesale grocer. Later, it was home to O.W. Storer’s Muncie Banking Company¹². Today, it’s most prominent features are its oriel windows, ornamental cornice, and corner turret.

Recreating the Roots Building was a challenge- round things like oriels and turrets aren’t easy to replicate in LEGO! I wound up using 1×4 swivel assemblies to attach window frames to 3×6 wedge plates for the oriels, which I capped with 2×4 triple slopes. I used a similar process to recreate the turret.

The last building I added to my model was the MITS Transfer Station. Not every city has a landmark bus stop, but Muncie sure does! Designed by architect J. Robert Taylor, the $1.1 million structure opened in 1987¹³. My LEGO version used translucent blue columns to anchor hinge plates to the building’s overhangs. It’s not as deep as the real building, but there’s no mistaking its likeness.

I can’t remember how many hours it took to design and render my gigantic LEGO Muncie in BrickLink Studio, but I spent way too much time on it. Aside from some initial thoughts, I made up the designs as I went, which added a considerable amount of time to something that ended up feeling more like work than fun.

Aside from the renders I shared, I never backed up any of my LEGO working files. They went to computer heaven when my eight-year-old iMac died a couple years ago. I think I could design the same quality model with half the parts in half the time today, but I’m happy to leave the door open to Muncie’s next combination LEGO-enthusiast-and-history-fan, if such a person exists.

I finished a few designs that didn’t make the final cut. The first was ten-story Ball batch tower. Engineered from 4,500 cubic yards of reinforced concrete continuously poured in a slipform method¹⁴, the 132-foot-tall tower was completed in 1954 to supply Ball Brothers’ Plant 2 with the sand, soda ash, lime, and cullet necessary to make glass Mason jars. I left it out after I decided to keep my Muncie skyline representative of downtown.

It’s hard to have a model of Muncie without Pizza King, but the restaurant on Tillotson was the last design I completed and eliminated from my LEGO Muncie. Just like the CINTAS truck at MadJax and the classic McDonald’s sign on Charles Street, Pizza King got the axe after I instituted a moratorium on commercial buildings. I was glad, since I had to use a series of 4×3 plant leaves pieces in conjunction with a 3×4 wedge to make the sign! It wasn’t very convincing.

Although I eliminated some buildings, I’m happy with how my skyline turned out. A few months after I finished it, I finally created a tiny one that satisfied what I’d set out to do all along: using 125 pieces, Micro Muncie measured an inch and a half tall by eight inches long and scaled to LEGO’s official Chicago set! It featured the Muncie City Hall, the Delaware County Justice Center and County Building, Cornerstone, the AT&T Building, and the Roberts.

As impractical as my big model was, I’d love to build a real-life miniature LEGO version to grace my bookshelf. Maybe I will! LEGOs will always hold a special place in my heart, and a micro-scale model of Muncie would serve as a tangible reminder of architectural diversity that can even be found in a random place like this city I call home.

Sources Cited
1 Penticuff, D. (1997, June 15). Tower talk. The Muncie Star Press. p. 45.
2 Moran, L. (1966, July 7). New Area Phone Services Due Oct. 16. The Muncie Star. p. 1.
3 New Bell Telephone Building Look (1969, October 30). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 1.
4 Roysdon, K. (2009, July 11). Historic group, historic building. The Muncie Star Press. p. 13.
5 National Register of Historic Places, Masonic Temple, Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana, National Register #84001020.
6 Baer, D. (1987, Roberts Hotel has colorful past. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 13.
7 Francisco, B. (1987, April 26). It’s a Fact! Radisson Hotel Muncie Opens. The Muncie Star. p. 1.
8 Slabaugh, S. (2018, July 27). Ivy Tech invites you to downtown demolition fun. The Muncie Star Press. p. A2.
9 Slabaugh, S. (2019, January 16). Ivy Tech opens new schools downtown. The Muncie Star Press. p. A1. 
10 National Register of Historic Places, Boyce Block, Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana, National Register #84001015.
11 Flook, C. (2022, December 7). Professional wrestling, Muncie Civic Theater. The Muncie Star Press. p. A2.
12 National Register of Historic Places, Roots, Francis T., Building, Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana, National Register #85000605.
13 Francisco, B. (1987, September 17). Downtown Bus Stop Draws Business. The Muncie Star. p. 1.
14 Greene, D. (1954, November 18). Seen and Heard in Our Neighborhood. The Muncie Star. p. 6.