I like to work in the micro scale so one of the things I like to do when I have a set with a lot of small pieces is to see if I can build looks of tiny things out of it. In this instance the set is the Chinese Temple, which I've used to build all sorts of things; temples, shape ships, African dolls and now this, four city building surrounding a nice city park with a lake.
Obviously it's designed to be viewed from inside of it rather than from the outside so the blank brown wall is not ideal.
But let's go building by building.
We start with the last building that I added to the scene and it's a strange futuristic, circular thing, lets call it a art centre of some sort, there are a series of circular balconies, where people can dine al fresco before or after the show. The arches of course echo the archway at the entrance of the National Gallery of Victoria in my hometown of Melbourne, so I imagine they are bluestone. The upper levels house admin wings and to architectural stick features because my town loves that sort of thing.
Moving around in a clockwise direction we come to the roman or maybe greek ruin distinct of this tiny tiny town. This is actually the building that sparked the idea. I had to do something with the tiny tiny minifigs, they had to be statues and then there were the fabulous colonnades pieces, put them together and you have yourself a ruin, or maybe a supreme court of something like that
But we are an multi-denominational city, so we also have a more Asian inspired temple, I imagine it in dark teak wood, maybe 500 or 600 years old, with golden columns, adornment and of course two spires reaching for the heavens because, well it's what you do.
So we have the arts, the law, religion so the final building must be commerce right - a towering, well, tower bluestone foundations (with just a hint of evil villain HQ before climbing into the sky, and evil dark greys, blacks and what is that at the top, well it's another spire.
Maybe I should call this place - spire town.
I do enjoy taking the simple lego piece and playing with the scale, this, if you imagine a plate being a single story then all sorts of things can happen.