"Read All Over" Bookstore

"Read All Over" Bookstore - LEGO MOC

Building a bookstore from cover to corrugated cover.

Our LEGO club is in the midst of a big project involving shipping containers, so I took the opportunity to do some research into shipping containers themselves, and buildings made from them. Sadly, the costs outweigh the benefits in most instances:

- they're designed to be easily moved, which doesn't always translate well into buildings
- they often have protective coatings and chemicals that can be toxic if not handled properly
- cutting doors and windows into the corrugation severely weakens the structure
- they're not proportioned well for human occupation (too long, too narrow, too short)
- they use a lot of metal, in places essential for a self-contained modular shipping unit, but excess for a structure

Indeed, many "shipping container buildings" only use them as accents rather than as part of their structure. Still, I can't deny that they look striking. Plus I had a lot of corrugated panels, so I leveraged my research and began planning what I would build. A store of some sort would make more sense, given that the striking visual effect would be more important than on a residence. A bookstore, perhaps.

But first I needed to figure out the proportions. Though minifigures aren't 1:1 proportioned like the humans they represent, I've found that a 1:48 scale works well to make buildings that feel human-scaled at minifigure size. (Note: because I'm left-handed, I often start at the right side of a paper and move leftwards so I'm not dragging my hand over what I just wrote). The table shows that conversion, then I held a ruler against some LEGOs to determine that a minifigure-scaled "high cube intermodal container" (the sort of shipping container most often used for such buildings) would be 30 studs long, 6.5 studs wide, and 6 1/3 bricks tall (or 6 bricks + 1 plate). Like any LEGO building, however, I needed to fudge the measurements to take into account the pieces involved and have room for furniture and people within the structure.

I settled on an 8x20 stud footprint, which would allow for three of the 6-stud-wide panels on either side and one (or a door or window) on each end. The panels are 5 bricks tall, so adding top and bottom bricks and plates would add appropriate height. Also you'll notice that I don't stick to these proportions: as the build progresses they will shift slightly, remaining flexible as plans become reality.

My next step was to turn the rough sketch into a physical space. Several of the shipping container buildings I had come across in my research utilized an area between containers to maximize usable human-scaled space without losing the aesthetic. Going by the eight-panels-per-container calculation above (an overestimate since I wasn't sure where or how many doors or windows I would be using yet) I was able to figure out that I had enough panel pieces for three containers. Placing two side by side with a container-sized gap between them would allow me to stack a third on top. I had enough quarter-circle window pieces from a Pick-A-Brick wall visit to make a nice round staircase, looking out into what would become a courtyard garden.

For the floors I intended to have a layering of plates—four 6x8 red plates on the bottom, with two 6x8 and one 6x6 in light stone grey on top to form the interior floor. This would keep the outside of the structure a solid red, but would give a strong footing for any furniture I would place inside. I did not, however, have enough plates to do floors and ceilings for all three containers.

So, while I waited for that order to come in—and now that I had a good idea of how much space I had available—I worked on the furniture. It started as a sketch on my to-do list, then became noodling around with various piece combinations, table-scrap-style. I wanted there to be a good visual variety, both in texture and color (such as in the "Books Are My Passion" set), with a uniformity of shelving to keep them from being too visually crazy. Again the parts I had on hand weren't—at first—sufficient, and I debated using dark tan for the lower parts, perhaps making it look like they were in shadow, but the difference was too distracting. Since I only had those 1 x 2 x 1 1/3 SNOT bricks in light tan, and only had enough window and door frames in that same color, I got a little creative, mixing plates and tiles so that I could have them all look the same (eg, combining two 1x3 plates to take the place of a 2x3 plate), trusting in the colors and textures of the books to distract from any seams.

You might notice that these bookcases are already in the pictures above. I had taken photos of just the 1x2 plates I'd used to "stake out" the footprint, moving them around until they seemed to feel in the right place, and of the container footprint template I'd mocked up with 2-wide plates, but as I waited for the floor and roof plates to arrive and continued refining the furniture I realized that it was far more effective to show them in situ, to give a better idea of just how much space I was working with. I also didn't need to show the failed attempts at arranging that space—for example, placing the bookcases on alternate walls for a zig-zag path, which looked neat but wasn't practical for an active bookstore—because they didn't last for much longer than a few minutes.

Once my plates arrived from BrickLink (augmented with more plates and bricks from the bulk bins of my local Bricks & Minifigs store) I as able to begin construction proper.

I liked the idea of using the two 1x4 red arches I'd found to make a built-in check-out counter (with a little card game underneath for when business is slow) but this meant that it was stuck in this specific spot, at this specific height, leaving not much room for the cashier behind it...and certainly when her hair is that large and distracting. I also came up against a question of which parts to use above and below the windows: plain, or fluted. Originally I'd only used plain bricks (right) but since I was able to find enough fluted bricks in the Bricks & Minifigs bulk bins, I decided that this would be a much more satisfying solution, echoing the corrugations of the side panels.

I also started working on the roof pieces, using much the same setup as I did with the floors, only inverted. I also was toying with different edges and middles to mimic the ridges on container tops (as you can see in the left and right halves of the following image).

Once I started putting it in place, however, I noticed a problem: the roof plate was bowing upward. Flipping it upside down, you can see that this seems to be due to the ceiling plates I used, each pushing slightly against the others and making the roof flex (the white 1x1s are to represent ceiling lights; indeed, throughout the build I used light tan pieces to indicate furniture and white pieces to indicate lighting, as you'll see later).

I fixed this by removing the ceiling plates and replacing them with 1x4 plates around the inner edges of the walls (this also meant adjusting the lighting plates, but that was a minor change). This removed the outward pressure that the three large ceiling plates (8x6, 6x6, 8x6) were exerting on one another, while still holding the four main 8x6 plates together, along with the semi-decorative ridge plates on the top.

When building the walls, I decided to try out something I'd been thinking about for some time. As I've grown as a LEGO builder, I've noticed several different approaches to buildings:

- the outside-only approach, where the exterior look and shape are what matters
- the inside-only approach, where it's treated like the set of a stageplay (as in Autumn's Room)
- the dollhouse approach, where interior and exterior are equally detailed, but a wall is left off (as in Liann's Family House—review pending)
- the toybox approach, where the building is whole and detailed inside and out, but with a split and hinges to allow access to the insides (as in my I Like Trains house)

Each of these have their strengths and weaknesses, but they all have one big flaw: inflexibility. As an artist and writer as well as an AFOL and budding MOCer, I like being able to have different angles and points of view available to me. This means I need some way of building a structure more like a movie set, where individual walls and pieces of furniture can be removed as needed so the camera can get where it needs to be for a particular shot. Enter the "Fallapart House" (a reference to Fall-Apart Rabbit from the Bonkers TV show I used to watch as a kid).

As you can see in this 1/2 scale proof of concept, the idea relies on 1x4 jumper plates to allow each wall section to be attached to the roof and floor securely enough to stay in place, but lightly enough to be easily removed as needed. I'll probably do another post just on the Fallapart House at a later date, but suffice to say it's something I've been toying with for a while, and this bookstore MOC turned out to be a great way to test my ideas.

Not only are the individual walls able to be removed and replaced as needed, but each shipping container (ironically) can be removed and replaced as a unit as well. You'll see later that I designed them with feet so they could be placed on jumpers on the ground without needing to be attached stud-for-stud along their entire bases.

After some trial and error, I was able to finish the first container. Since this is where the main customer door is located, as well as the cashier's counter, this seemed to be a good place to begin, and a template I could use in building the other two containers.

I also polished the interior details, like adding a reading nook to the window at the far end (with two tall lamps) and a stand up front to display the hottest new books (taking advantage of the panels' hollow backsides for a little extra build room). The cashier's desk is now shorter, with a space for a box full of shopping bags underneath, and four studs of space between it and the first bookcase. I also decided that the staff uniform would be green, to better stand out against the red walls. Can you spot the other employee somewhere in the building?

You can see in the above photo how I used L-shaped plates to anchor the corners of the fallapart design: so long as each wall is structurally sound in itself, it'll pop off those few connection points quite easily. Once the first part was done, the second and third containers came together pretty quickly. The modular nature of the shipping container approach, however, presented a new problem: I wasn't sure how to orient the top container, and with it the stairs. The below photo grid shows the two options: if I had the stairs in the courtyard, that fit with my original inward-facing design, but left the front feeling monolithic and plain; if I rotate it 180° so that the staircase is on the front, that then becomes the focus of the whole façade. I also toyed with variations on the punny name I had in mind for this rose-colored building.

I finally made my decisions (inward-looking and "Read," respectively) and set about polishing it up. The bare façade was enlivened by a red statue and some landscaping (I chose the bonsai tree as a further reference to the old "black and white and red all over" joke, with its black trunk and pink—red plus white—leaves). Both the tree and the statue are on fluted red columns to further evoke the corrugated look of the shipping containers. Front and back stairs in red and a grey parking lot further tie the building to its surroundings. You can also see the green 2x2 round jumper plates I put down for building attachment points.

The staircase ended up being fairly simple—1x4 plates for the steps and 1x1 round plates for the risers—given the space and part constraints, but it fits within the round window bay and connects effectively to the upper level. I also included a helpful sign pointing out the seating available in the upper floor.

Below are the three containers—first wing, second wing, and second floor—with their roofs and side walls exploded. The first wing has its cashier stand and reading nook, as well as an archway to connect to the stairs; the second wing also has a reading nook and a stack of boxes by the rear door; the second floor has couches on either side, two window-mounted desks, ample lighting, clerestory windows along both long walls, and a barred window looking out on the staircase.

As a further test of my Fallapart approach, I put everything back together, but without certain walls. As you can see, this gives a look into the building as one might see in an Incredible Cross-Sections book (talk about nostalgia), while still remaining structurally sound. The lighting gets a little iffy, but if I were using this as a reference for a painting, for example, I'd be able to manage that more directly.