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 540K)
Daniel Shiu and I worked on this as a joint project after we finished our rendition of Escher's "Relativity", making it our fifth Escher picture rendered in LEGO. Yeah, OK, this time we cheated big time. You can find out how we did it further down this page. There are also details of some of the more interesting construction features. The original Escher picture (Waterfall, 1961. Lithograph) is shown on the right for comparison.
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OK, let's come clean. We actually resorted to photographic manipulation for this one. The model as built has the right-hand tower in the background. The water channels running from bottom left to top right are genuine and connect the two towers as shown. But the channels running bottom right to top left are actually only connected to the left-hand (near) tower. We took two photographs of the model; one with and one without these channels, but from the identical viewpoint:
The final image was constructed by very carefully overlaying portions of the left image with the corresponding portions from the right. Yes, it's dirty. We couldn't see how else to do it. Sorry.
To make up for the gross cheating, the model does have a number of interesting construction details. Here are some highlights (click on the small pictures for larger versions):
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The waterfall itself was about an evening's work. I started by writing some C code to model a gradually widening parabolic arch with random variations for the spray (hacked from the code I use for my mathematical Lego sculptures) and then gradually modified it by hand until I liked the look of the result. The roof was originally constructed with standard slope bricks, but we wanted to model the rough tiled look of Escher's picture. The general construction is blatantly stolen from a roof construction method I had noticed at Legoland Windsor, though I simplified it a bit for this model. The entire roof is built of brown plates, and pretty much exhausted my collection. |
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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 "Relativity"
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This page last modified 1st April 2005