The Panda House is the home of the Copenhagen Zoo’s two new pandas. In a collaboration between the Zoo and the Copenhagen LEGO Store I was asked to build a model of this, to be exhibited in the LEGO Store.
The building have almost no straight lines anywhere, and the shape is representation of the yin and yang with the curved separation between the two enclosures. The build also features a lot of greenery to portray the kind of lush environment of pandas natural habitat.
The trickiest feature to make was the round walkway going all the way around the build, with lots of experimentation at the start to get the right diameter of the ring but still keep it reasonably sturdy.
When it comes to scale the build had to be a bit skewed, with slightly different scale for the different elements of the build. This was due to the desire to incorporate LEGO minifigures, while still being able to fit the build into a display case of a certain size. One consequence of this is that the area for the panda looks smaller in the build than in real life.
Due to all the rounded shapes many very bit intensive techniques had to be used, pushing the number of pieces used quite high, to around 10,000. This is a very rough number though, as the method used for organic building is very iterative and keeping track of usage is not easy.
All in all it has been a fun challenge to build, and I’m really happy with how it turned out!