The Roof aka Lois’ Smoking Lounge

Climbing the roof access stairs from the fourth floor, our tiny heroes would emerge onto the roof of the Planet behind the famed dome and globe. This area has played many a scene in films, television and of course comics books.

My version was designed as a nod to where Lois went to smoke in Superman Returns, as well as the small access building where Clark finally took flight in the series finale of Smallville.

This particular version also includes a radio tower, an air conditioning unit, a grand clock on the front of the building under the dome, and a rather sassy seagull sitting on the corner of the building.

Originally, I considered making the room under the dome Perry’s office, but I also knew I wanted the globe on top of the dome to rotate as I’d see it do in film and TV. I also didn’t originally have a clock below the dome, but when I happened upon the Big Ben clock face element (44375bpb07) I immediately wanted to incorporate it. Initially, I wanted to make the clock work like the Harry Potter Clock Tower did, but since the globe was directly on top of the dome which was itself centered on the clockwork building, I quickly decided to focus on making the globe turn and let the clock be simply decorative. Note: in the renders from Stud.io the clock face element didn’t behave correctly, and I was forced to replace it with a plain blank white one. Obviously when I build my model I used the correct clock face for the model.

All of this said, surprisingly, getting the clock to look right was a real challenge. The Daily Planet was my first real design of anything in LEGO and I was a complete newbie when it came to even what elements were available to use, but after what seemed like a million iterations I arrived at a design that I actually liked:

This looks deceptively simple, so I created a few exploded views of what I eventually arrived at:

There was one other constraint on the clock design; at the end of the day I needed to also have enough room to get a small Powered Up! motor directly underneath the center of the dome in order to have a shaft go all the way down from the turntable element that the globe was attached to the motor. Here’s a render of the motor assembly:

Amazingly, the clock design above allowed the motor to be in place with zero studs between the motor support and the back of the clock. By this time, all that remained was the dome design and of course the globe with the lettering around it, but before we talk about that, here’s a few more renders of the 5th floor roof. A few things to note however: Notice the transparent bricks between the globe and the lettering – after the model these were rendered from was complete I found a better element to replace them. Also, in the right hand picture below I’ve removed the back wall of the clock room so you can see how the Powered Up! hub is placed inside. In particular it’s oriented so I can swing open that back wall and plug in a USB cable to charge the hub battery.