St. Mark's Cathedral

This is a replica of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice Italy.

I've been trying to model this building with LEGO for a long time. I've been able to get it right, but I've come up with a lot of creative variations on the structure (look around my web site for references). With the CAD approach, I don't have to worry about lack of parts. Of course, this building would be much better if it were real!

(see below for more descriptions and pictures)

		This is the view as one of the faithful enters the massive, main portal.

		This shot shows one of the side portals. The top of the portal niche is a hemispherical, Aquazone windshield, molded in white.

		This is a view from the left of the building

		This is a bird's eye view looking down from the right.

Accuracy of Model

I attempted to be as accurate as possible, but simplification is always necessary when building with LEGO. Primary changes are as follows:

	The overall theme of my building is far more vertical than the original. I tried emulating the proportions of the real building, but it just didn't look right, so I added about 30% to the height of the second story.
	The arches on the original are far larger. I used the biggest arches available in LEGO, but they aren't nearly the correct size. I suspect that the small arch size contributed to my problems with getting the correct proportions.
	The columns on the real building are thinner than in the model.
	The model is just a facade with some "props" behind. The front of the building is highly detailed, but the side walls extend only a short distance. The roof extends about half of the true depth of the building. This absence of walls and a roof was necessary because my computer is very slow manipulating the model even at its current complexity. It would be very time consuming to add the rest of the walls and ceiling because each part addition could cause a second or two of computing.
	There are murals on top of each entry portal in the real building. Although there are ways of imprinting images onto virtual LEGO blocks, I don't know how to do this (and I'm not really interested in spending that much time to do something like this).
	Obviously, there a great deal of other details missing in the model.

Feasibility of Creating a Real LEGO version of this Model

Most of my CAD models would be prohibitively expensive to build in real LEGO due to the extensive use of rare parts. However, this model uses primarily standard parts that are easily available. However, the following parts might be problems:

	The large domes come only in transparent colors (from space and underwater sets). The model would look a bit sci-fi with a transparent set of domes. As an alternative, the domes could be built with a lot of standard slope bricks.
	Above the side portals, I used Aquazone, hemispherical canopies. These are only available in trans-green and trans-blue. To model this in real life, it would be necessary to use standard inverse slopes. This wouldn't look quite as good as in this CAD model, but I don't think that the trans-blue canopy pieces would fit in.
	I used extremely large numbers of 1x1x1 round pieces. These are easy to find, but I don't personally have the huge amounts necessary to build this model. I suspect that some people do have sufficient parts though. The parts could be obtained without too much cost by trading or purchasing from www.brickbay.com.
	Getting sufficient numbers of 1x1 blue and white tiles would be a bit of a challenge, but I again suspect that the parts could be purchased for relatively moderate expense from BrickBay.

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