Space Needle 21003 Review
I recently got the chance to visit the Seattle Space Needle, and I was happy to see that they had the LEGO Architecture Seattle Space Needle set. The instruction booklet was higher quality than most ordinary sets but not as good as the LEGO Ideas sets. The build starts off with a Base and builds upward. It was much easier than I expected to cut the hard pneumatic tubing. The top is cleverly built with radar dishes and a gear. Overall I think the designers could have done a better job with designing it because the real Needle has three similar sized rings with the observation deck and the SkyCity being between them. This set highlights the SkyCity windows using the 40 toothed gear but it makes the observation deck and top ring seem much smaller that it is in reality. The middle ring should also be larger and have gaps in it, but I do not see any way to easily improve this. The connection of the three support poles to the top and the base leave some odd gaps. One of the test models shown in the booklet fixes this better. Overall it gives the general sense of the iconic building, but it is not entirely accurate. Also in the gift shop they were selling a unnamed clone brick company’s buildable model of the Space Needle. It looked almost identical to the LEGO set but it was selling for about half the price. I am happy to have gotten the real LEGO one before they had replaced all of their stock with the fake.
