I consider this to be the "first" Architecture set, mostly cause I think that the line all came from a model of the Sears Tower, there was the Brickstructures release before this. The start of it all! Also, cause it's 21000.

If I'm wrong on the origins of the Architecture line, please tell me if anyone's got more knowledge, I remember reading it but I don't remember where.

I always liked the look of Architecture, but never bought any 'cause they seemed a tad pricey. I wonder how hard it would be to part some of them out?

Do we remeber this as good? Sure, it's how the line started but the buildings had such a lack of detail. I'm not really sure about this one.

You're paying for the souvenir value, not the bricks. Although the printed tile is a big lure, as well.

I've been up this tower, and I'd love to get this model (Sears, not Willis - although I don't think I'd be fussy at this point). It's so much better then a magnet or mug. But I was only just out of my dark ages and just didn't notice it.

I'll make do with the Chicago skyline set...

I guess most of the early Architecture sets were only interesting if you 1) were familiar or had an attachment to the real-life locations and 2) bought them there as a memento. And maybe 3) were fans of all things modern architecture.

As someone from outside the US who learnt of most of these landmarks through these sets and having to look them up... I was in neither camp. I'm also not much of a fan of the visual design of most skyscrapers, no matter how much engineering went into it. Sorry.

Even so, I was gifted 21002 in 2015 and immediately sold it. I knew of the Empire State Building, but it felt like too much of a waste to actually open the box to stack those basic bricks as a featureless monolith in the shape of the building. It felt waay more enticing to just sell it and get something I would get way more value out of besides knowing I have the _official_ stack of bricks in the shape of the building.

As for the packaging, instructions etc. While a nice premium touch (those black pages must have taken sooo much ink), I buy Lego for the bricks, building experience and final model. Not for the stuff around that.

Do we all forget that ever thing has to have a starting point ,and from there grow and develop.....get better If you are so good why are you not putting your MOC's up to become future Lego sets!!!

Just look how far the modern motorcar has come ,the same with Lego

@LegoDavid said:
"So, essentially I am paying 20$ for a small pile of super common black bricks?!?!? I could be building this thing super easily out of a bunch of my spare parts! In terms of value, this gotta to be one of the worst sets of all time.
This set is pretty much a scam in every way, and apparently 1859 people fell for it..."

Like all things did you come up with the idea / do better... it is so easy to be a critic of other peoples efforts

@beckersfuzzy just because it caught on it doesn't mean the first attempt is free from being criticized. In fact, back then it might have caught on precisely because adult-oriented lego was only in its infancy with the first modulars coming out around that time. I greatly respect Adam Reed Tucker, but that doesn't mean better offerings have since appeared and were possible with the parts available at the time.
In that year you definitely could do better with the parts they had back then. The thing is, the early achitecture sets prided themselves on their simplicity, and with that criterium it's hard to get simpler than this. But that doesn't take away the fact that this is super, super simple. 'Anyone can replicate this with their own parts' simple. It's a valid criticism that the value of the actual bricks provided is one of the lowest for the price. Everything around it is what sold them. The instructions, box, and novelty of buying a model of a famous (?) REAL building. The presentation was top-notch, especially for the time. But it's also a valid criticism that you shouldn't have to pay that much for the presentation when you're not into that.

@lemish34 when the aftermarket price skyrocketed the original price can still be relatively expensive. In fact, usually aftermarket prices are high when few people bought something in its original run. Usually when it's the first of something niche. When that niche becomes more mainstream, people scramble to get back, but their demand meets a low supply (as few were sold). Of course, I doubt the orginal was exactly scarcely sold... but this mechanism likely still happened.

@lynels:
I wouldn’t call him a “big name” architect. You’re probably less likely to have name recognition as an architect than you are as an actor. Any fame he has seems to have come from his LEGO hobby, not from being an architect.

The price involved a lot of things that aren’t normally an issue. They had premium boxes and premium instructions with premium content (there is a lot of info about the buildings inside). Until the theme was brought in-house, they had to pay royalties to the set designers. They also had to pay licensing for the likenesses of the buildings, and these were intended more for a non-traditional retail market that needed higher markups to compete with stuff like $12 coffee mugs at cramped newsstands and souvenir shops.

This isn’t the only style of set he designed, though. He also designed the only Architecture set I’ve actually built, which is Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (21005). I’m not sure why both of these sets list Steen Sig Anderson as the designer, since Adam’s name is right on the box. Anyways, the initial Architecture lineup was kind of a joke to the AFOL community, but Fallingwater was the set that kind of turned things around and changed the direction the entire theme would take from then on.

@AustinPowers:
While his large-scale MOC of Fallingwater has been criticized for having a topographic grid for the landscaping, I don’t recall hearing anything negative about the set. The same is not true for 21010 Robbie House. The one person I know who built it said it was the worst set he’d ever built, simply because you get 771x dark-red 1x2 plates, and all you do with them is build brick walls. I don’t really see any way around that, given the design of the real building (and I did far worse with my 13k+ piece Flash trail that uses about 7k trans-red 1x2 plates).

@Binnekamp:
You have no idea how much ink the black pages take. Someone with experience in the print industry said that if you just printed it in black, it would look terrible. So you print it in “rich black”, which is at least one layer of actual black, plus at least a few saturated layers of other colors. It’s not only a ridiculous amount of ink, but you can’t do it all at once or you’ll destroy the page. You have to give it time to dry between each pass, which just cranks up the expense.

Who can also forget the Willis Tower version, 21000-2 ? It was only sold for a very short time in 2011 before they realized nobody would recognize it under that name.... at least, that's probably what happened. It wasn't very long until the Sears tower set was back anyway, and lasted until 2013 after being on shelves for 5 years!

@maffyd said:
"You're paying for the souvenir value, not the bricks. Although the printed tile is a big lure, as well.

I've been up this tower, and I'd love to get this model (Sears, not Willis - although I don't think I'd be fussy at this point). It's so much better then a magnet or mug."
Agreed. I haven’t been inside the building but I’ve seen it from the outside several times and I have to say that at the scale of this set, without new moulds, I don’t think you can create a better likeness in LEGO.

@PurpleDave said:
" @Binnekamp:
You have no idea how much ink the black pages take. Someone with experience in the print industry said that if you just printed it in black, it would look terrible. So you print it in “rich black”, which is at least one layer of actual black, plus at least a few saturated layers of other colors. It’s not only a ridiculous amount of ink, but you can’t do it all at once or you’ll destroy the page. You have to give it time to dry between each pass, which just cranks up the expense."
I have an example of what can go wrong if you try to cut costs when printing on black. I have a book on art (nothing to do with LEGO) where the dark tones weren’t allowed to dry properly. The result are pages that look fine initially but get indelibly and conspicuously marked by fingerprints. I have to wear gloves to handle the pages! Fortunately, it was 95% off the cover price at a book discounter. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have got it.

The early architecture sets put me off of the theme for years. It wasn't until they started doing the skyline sets that I began to take interest in the line. Doesn't really matter if they were "testing the waters" for adult sets, most of the early Architecture sets were objectively bad, even for the period. LEGO had done better adult sets before then and they certainly could have done better with these. Of course, most damning of all was their insane pricing.

I realized I was misremembering Brickstructures. It consisted of five or six basic parts. 1x1x5 bricks formed the certain framing, I think 1x6 Technic bricks (w/ holes drilled into the ends) were the horizontal frames, and 1x1 bricks w/ 5 studs formed the corners. The hand-dropped holds were so the side studs could fit into the ends of the Technic bricks. Then half-pins went into the center holes of the Technic bricks to hang the custom window panes from. I can’t remember if you got baseolates, or 1x1 round plates to hold the windows on to the half-pins (hey, it’s been at least 15 years since I set eyes on this stuff).

@peterlmorris:
Certainly that’s true for 21003...

@Binnekamp:
Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world for a quarter century, and kicked off the wall-of-glass phase of modern architecture. If you’ve been in the vicinity of Chicago, you’ve definitely seen it (unless you had your eyes closed, you never once looked up, or you’re actually blind). If you live in the US, you’ve most likely heard of it at some point. If you’ve visited downtown Chicago, there’s a good chance you’ve been inside it (it has the highest observation deck in the US, allowing you to see Michigan across Lake Michigan on a clear day).

@Zander:
That’s the main complaint about black pages for instructions. They’re printed on a semi-glossy paper, so it absorbs oil really well, and they could just take a picture of the page to in your prints at a crime scene. In my experience, it does go away as the oil gets fully absorbed, but right as you’re handling it, it looks really bad.

@Biggie_Bricks:
The company is largely blameless for the early designs. One of the main selling points of the line for a few years was that all the sets were designed by trained architects, but none of them were employed by the company. They were contractually limited in their options when this came across their desk, unless it was part of the original pitch.

At the gift shop in the actual Willis Tower, they sell a clone brand version of this. Natives to Chi-town say that you should always call it the Sears Tower, but I like to think I'm homaging Wesley Willis when I call it the Willis Tower.

Did anyone else have the Space Needle set that released at the same time as this one? Weird set, the only time I can think of that the instructions required me to cut a piece with scissors.

@Murdoch17 said:
"Who can also forget the Willis Tower version, 21000-2 ? It was only sold for a very short time in 2011 before they realized nobody would recognize it under that name.... at least, that's probably what happened. It wasn't very long until the Sears tower set was back anyway, and lasted until 2013 after being on shelves for 5 years!"

Now that version I do have, with its Willis Tower plaque and bought from the gift shop at the top the Sears/Willis Tower as a souvenir - and still built and on display. I actually have a soft spot for these early architecture sets (and have the early Empire State and Guggenheim), yes they were pricey and blocky but they did have a distinct aesthetic in their simplicity.

@Vladtheb said:
"Did anyone else have the Space Needle set that released at the same time as this one? Weird set, the only time I can think of that the instructions required me to cut a piece with scissors."
Perhaps at the time - I’m not sure - but certainly not the last time. 70404 King’s Castle requires you to cut a piece of string (Book 1, Step 23). Helpfully, it does show you how long a piece of string is :~P

@CopperTablet said:
"At the gift shop in the actual Willis Tower, they sell a clone brand version of this. Natives to Chi-town say that you should always call it the Sears Tower, but I like to think I'm homaging Wesley Willis when I call it the Willis Tower."

Whachoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?

Well, this has to have been one of the easiest Architecture sets to design, if not THE easiest...

@Vladtheb:
Several older Technic/Mindstorms sets had you cut flex tube or pneumatic tube. I don’t know if they ever had you cut crinkle tube, though. I don’t remember having to cut string, either, but anything that’s extruded onto a spool (except electrical wiring) is a possibility. There may be instances where you have to cut paper or cardstock, too. I know the Bohrok and Bohrok Kal sets all had you remove the front sticker from the pod they shipped in if you wanted to turn it into a hibernation chamber (there was an appropriate pattern on the inside of the other sticker, and a clip that attached to the underside of the lid so you could suspend the rolled-up Bohrok).

should have been literally half the price but it is what it is

The first ever Architecture set!