“Adult Fans of Lego Can Submit Designs for Limited Edition Sets” by S.M. O’Connor

BrickLink, LEGO® Group Team Up to Celebrate LEGO® Brick’s 60^th Anniversary

After a teaser announcement on Thursday, September 6, 2018, California-based BrickLink Corporation, in cooperation with The LEGO® Group, would be hosting an Adult Fan of LEGO (A.F.O.L.) Designer Group, the BrickLink Team announced on Wednesday, September 12, 2018 that A.F.O.L.s can submit designs for limited edition LEGO® sets. This is part of the celebrations of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the LEGO® Brick.

Designs must be submitted with Studio 2.0. BrickLink started to accept entries on Tuesday, September 18, 2018 and will be accepting entries through Sunday, November 18, 2018. Submitted designs will be publicly displayed during this time period. The LEGO® design team will review submissions made with Studio 2.0, and up to twenty finalists will be selected.

In February of 2019, selected designs will be announced and displayed for crowdfunding purposes. At that time, the public will be able to pre-order sets. Designers who submit designs that are not selected will retain full I.P. (intellectual property) rights, meaning they can freely use their original designs for any other purpose after the contest.

Successfully crowdfunded designs will become limited-edition 60 Years Anniversary sets, which will be available exclusively through the BrickLink Website. BrickLink will pay 10% of total sales revenue to designers for all successfully crowdfunded AFOL designs including pre-order. The BrickLink Team will begin to ship orders in April of 2019.

One can review all the requirements online here. People who have ideas for designs but who are not designers themselves can share their design ideas with the A.F.O.L. in the Studio forum.

The Field Museum of Natural History in March, 2018

The Field Museum of Natural History’s entrance pavilions are at opposite ends of Stanley Field Hall, which has a north-south axis. The two porticos (porches) are each reached by two successive flights of stairs.

Both porticos of The Field Museum of Natural History are flanked by two small porches, which each have two caryatids (columns in the shape of maidens). On the facade, the wings are adorned with a colonnade of attached fluted Ionic columns. The building’s fluted Ionic columns have volutes (spiral-scroll-shaped crowns).

Each portico of The Field Museum is tetrastyle in antis with double-ranked fluted Ionic columns capped by volutes. An entablature crowned by a pediment rests atop the columns. The continuous frieze in each case is relatively plain. The wave-themed acroteria that crown the pediments are borrowed from the Palace of a Fine Arts, which housed The Field Museum until 1920 and now houses the Museum of Science and Industry.

The Field Museum of Natural History isn’t “just” a museum. Visitors can watch scientists at work through windows at the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice DNA Discovery Center’s Pritzker Laboratory.

Mrs. Charles (Laura) Schweppe, a daughter and co-heiress of John Graves Shedd, the former partner of Marshall Field I who succeeded him as president of Marshall Field & Company, and who, under the guidance of Stanley Field founded the Shedd Aquarium, donated an exhibit of 100 bronze sculptures by Malvina Hoffman to The Field Museum. They represent every race, nation, and tribe in the human family (more or less). On January 9, 1933, the first group, Unity of Man, went on display.

In addition to the four figures Henry Hering (1874-1949) made for the corners of Stanley Field Hall, he also made the twelve plaster round lion head shield escutcheons that line it. These are replicas of the marble round lion head shield escutcheon he made for the pediment of the facade of The Field Museum of Natural History.

Christmas at Chicago’s Union Station

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a POLAR EXPRESS display in the Great Hall of Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a closeup of the THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is the headlamp of THE POLAR EXPRESS steam locomotive mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Union Station Company rail car loaded with super-size gifts is part of THE POLAR EXPRESS mock-up in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This is a Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.

Credit: S.M. O’Connor Caption: This Christmas tree in the Great Hall of Union Station in downtown Chicago has emblems of Amtrak, Metra, and historic railroad companies whose routes they now operate like Burlington.

Cinemas sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) Helped Design

This is the Pickwick Theatre Building, an Art Deco movie palace and office building erected in downtown Park Ridge, Illinois in 1928.

The architects were Roscoe Harold Zook and William F. McCaughey. Sculptor Alfonso Iannelli, who also worked on the Adler Planetarium, contributed to this building.

In recent years, the Vlahakis family, who’ve owned the building for 50 years, have been able to turn the building into a multiplex by adding smaller theaters around the original auditorium. The latest one, with a screen four times the size of the one in the auditorium, will open in time to screen INFINITY WARS in May, if all goes well.

The Catlow Movie Theater is a cinema that opened in downtown Barrington, Illinois in 1927. The Tudor Revival style of architecture is not confined to the facade of the cinema. As with the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois, sculptor Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) played a role in the design and decoration of The Catlow Movie Theater.