I don’t often take pictures of my MOCs and upload them on the Internet because I have a bad tendency of not finishing them. It usually involves waiting for pieces to arrive from Bricklink and as soon as I have them and am ready to iterate over the construction, I have another MOC idea in mind.
However it’s been a rather long time I wanted to build a science lab. In September I started making something out of some white bricks but I quickly realized that was not as easy as I thought. After a few tries I ended up building the science lab I know best: the one in which I work. After a first prototype I posted a picture on Flickr. It was the first time I posted online a photo of one of my MOC and I have been quite surprised how people reacted to them. It kept me motivated enough to not abandon this MOC and continue to work on it.
While I have not progressed a lot in more than two months I am now sharing the result of my second and third iterations on my computer science lab MOC.
First the major differences are related to the walls and the size of the room. Initially there was only 3 walls for it be camera and photographer friendly. However I did not like that the missing wall was a small one, it didn’t look nice. So I added a fourth wall which meant that I also had to slightly grow the size of the room. It is now two studs longer. But because I want it to stay camera friendly I modified the wall with windows so it can easily be taken out.
Another major change is that I ordered from Bricklink some brown window and door frames to be more realistic and give more contrasts in the colors. The doors should be green but the only green LEGO doors have windows. So instead I ordered three more orange door like the ones from the Simpsons house.
I finally I added some furniture: three grey metallic storage cabinet. This is the modification that required me the more work. Initially I wanted to have cabinets with working doors so I could add something to store inside but it did not work well.
I came with these three designs for the cabinets.
I designed first the one on the right. It is still my favorite design but it does not work because it is too large to fit in the MOC. Then I came with the on the left. It work quite well for my needs because it is 4 studs large but on the other hand it is also 4 studs wide. I could have fit it in the wall for it to be only 3 studs wide but I realized quickly that it would not work either: opening a door actually makes it larger than 4 studs. So I came with the simplest design in the middle with non-opening doors. I don’t know if it’s possible to do something better but in the end it is the most appropriate and most realistic one I was able to design.
There is still quite a lot of work before I can consider this finished. First there is still some furniture that is missing: a small desk on the lower left corner of the room and some chair for people to play work on the desk. But before that I will probably make some modifications to what looks like a big desk: it should look more like 5 different desks assembled together so multiple persons can work in the room. Also it lacks what everyone would expect in a computer science labs: computers! (On the other hand I have colleagues that can do computer science without computers!) Finally I will completely tile the floor so it has a more natural look and also more contrast in terms of color.
When all of these will be done I will be consider it has done. At least the first version because I have already plans for the future. First it would be nice to have another wall easily removable to take photos at another angle. Then the size of the room is slightly smaller than a modular building and it would be nice to extend it to make a modular floor out of it. In particular there is big need for a room to make coffee and I have more ideas I could use to make a full modular computer science building.