Back then, I often climbed around Notre-Dame de Paris in Assassin’s Creed Unity. Now I have assembled it as a Lego set with more than 4,000 pieces. I just haven’t seen him in real life yet. Maybe I should do it again sometime? At least the construction of this miniature version didn’t take as long as the original; I don’t have around 200 years to do it.
The Notre-Dame de Paris is the latest set from Lego’s Architecture series. No comparison to the old skylines of various cities, but an extensive structure including a removable roof, which allows you to take a look inside. Whether it’s worth it is another question. The interior equipment is limited to the bare essentials and does not go into extreme detail. Columns and arches can be seen, as can the floor slabs.
Convincing result, but not down to the last detail
Ultimately, of course, there are always limits that you set for yourself when replicating it in a certain format. When I look at photos of the interior of the cathedral, I also see, for example, stained glass windows, which Lego does not reproduce in its model. Which is a shame. The windows consist largely of transparent 1×1 bricks. It’s not impossible to print these, I would have liked to see the attempt.
As I said, you can’t go into the very last detail, but there are plenty of other identifying features that can be recreated. The bell towers, the quadruple tower, the round back wall. Given the number of parts, all of this is a lot of detailed work and some things are of course repeated based on the model. It is a symmetrical building, so this cannot be avoided. But it might not be for you if you like building unusual things outside the norm where the construction steps are as similar as possible.
Lego Notre-Dame de Paris – pictures
Since you can look inside, at least, unlike many areas of the UCS TIE Interceptor, there are no colorful stones to use as gap fillers. At the end you also place a few trees on one side of the building, there has to be a bit of greenery around it too. I would have found it even cooler if part of the island on which the cathedral stands, including the river, could have been recreated. But then either the scale would have had to be even smaller or the number of parts would have had to be much larger.
So in the end it’s a reasonable compromise for me because I think the set looks pretty good on my shelf. If Lego worked even more with extensive lighting systems, it would be a real eye-catcher in the dark. Fortunately, there are no stickers here, but the number of printed elements is also very limited.
In the end, building Notre-Dame de Paris out of Lego isn’t too much of a challenge. Considering the number of parts, it takes a while; we were busy here for a good week – with a workload of just under 30 to 60 minutes each , I would say. Of course it takes a bit and how quickly you build always depends on you. It’s a little fiddly in places, but the end result is convincing. Some people may complain about the lack of details, such as the windows, but I think Lego did the best they could, at least externally, given the scale.
You can buy the Lego Notre-Dame de Paris at, among other places Lego online storeat Amazon.de, Alternate or Media Markt.
