Escher's “Relativity” in Lego (2003)
Escher's "Relativity" in LEGO



Because The LEGO Company get paranoid about this sort of thing let me make it clear that I have no affiliation with them, that my views are my own and do not necessarily represent theirs, 
and so on. So if you think any of this is official you are as deluded as they are. 

Click on the picture or here for a bigger version (about 410K)
  


Daniel Shiu and I worked on this as a joint project after we finished our rendition of 
Escher's "Ascending and Descending", making it our fourth Escher picture rendered 
in LEGO. Once again, no camera tricks, but the picture has to be taken from 
exactly the right place, and boy did we get tired of trying to find where that place 
was. The whole thing took five or six evenings spread over two or three weeks. 
Most of the last evening was taken up with setting up the lighting the way we 
wanted it and trying to get the camera position just right...
The original Escher picture (Relativity, 1953. Lithograph) is shown on the right for 
comparison.
Unlike many of Escher's other "impossible" pictures (like "Ascending and 
Descending") , there is actually no optical illusion involved here. Gravity seems to 
be working in three different directions simultaneously, but the picture shows a 
perfectly self-consistent physical scene. So modelling it should certainly be feasible. 
But while Escher's picture has three different "up"s, LEGO isn't quite so flexible...
For LEGO afficionados, the most significant thing about our version is the 
widespread use of SNOT ("Studs not on top") techniques - in plain English, having 
the LEGO studs pointing in lots of different directions. There are various tricks for 
making this work in general, and we probably used all of them here. You can find 
some of the details in the construction pictures.



Some Construction Details...
Click on the small pictures for larger versions.
  


Here's the final construction, taken from a slightly different angle and further away so you can see what's going on. It's all a bit messy - lots of scaffolding to 
hold it all up.

The early stages of construction

A SNOT detail: This little man sitting on his bench was constructed as a separate module....

...that fixes under here. The technique here is to use Technic 1/2 pins sticking into 1x1 Technic beams. The head of the pin protrudes sideways (= upwards 
in this picture) and can be used as a LEGO stud to plug into the bottom of a brick. The bench itself is a 1x4 brick with studs on the side.

The same 1/2-pins-and-beams trick was used to fix this vertical railing to the wall. Here I've pulled it off so that you can see what's going on. Of course the 
really tricky thing here is getting the spacing right because of the 6/5 height-to-width ratio of a LEGO brick, but 4 studs width = 3 bricks and a plate high. 
So it's not entirely accidental that the railing supports are 4 studs apart from each other...

This staircase and arch was fixed to the wall in the same way. Here I've pulled it away from the wall and turned it round. Of course the stair/arch 
construction itself is pretty SNOTty. I'm not entirely happy with the way we did this, but it was the best we could manage. We used 1x1 headlight bricks to 
fix the arches to the stairways.

Here I've pulled off the tower and bridge which appear on the right of the finished picture. The direction of the studs changes at the end of the stairs. The 
technique here is to use a Technic pin to hold together two 1x1 Technic beams oriented at right angles to each other, and join everything else to the Technic 
beams.

Finally, here's another overall view. This time you can see some of the lights we used for the final photograph. Yes, I know it's not very 
professional-looking. As a final (though invisible in the finished picture) ea=xample of SNOT, notice the vertical green baseplate behind the far wall. This is 
there to stop the light on the right shining through the doorway at the top of the model. It is fixed on with yet another technique: A couple of 1x4 bricks are 
fixed on the baseplate, and their studs fit into the holes in a long Technic beam which clips onto the top of the wall.


All M. C. Escher works (C) Cordon Art, Baarn, the Netherlands. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The official M.C. Escher web site is worth a visit. In particular they have a "virtual ride" through "Ascending 
and Descending".
All other pictures on this page are Copyright © A. Lipson 2003.
LEGO ® is a trademark of The LEGO Group, who have nothing to do with this or any of my other LEGO-related web pages.
Our other LEGO renditions of Escher works are "Balcony", "Belvedere" and "Ascending and Decending" and "Waterfall".
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