Topping It Off: The Triumphs and Tribulations of Crafting a New Hashima Tower

Blake Foster, a sci-fi builder and member of ILUGNY, shares his experience building a tower for the New Hashima collab. This project, which took him nearly a year and a half to complete, challenged his sanity more than any other creation he has worked on. Foster, primarily a spacecraft builder, took a break from his usual work to create this tower.

Foster began with sketches and a full-scale sketch-build, which served as a plan for his creation. The second sketch featured the tower on a framework of steel beams, which became the starting point for the build. The space between the beams is packed with greebles, which obscures the tiny footprint of the tower's core, estimated to cover an area equal to about a single 8x16 plate. The framework of beams provides little resistance to lateral forces, so Foster incorporated 3-4-5 triangles formed by the beams to provide extra strength.

The core of the tower needed to be absolutely rigid in the lower levels to absorb any lateral force. It is locked together with Technic and has thick walls, which made the wire channel up the middle extremely narrow. The tower is designed so that any LED light can be replaced without disassembly, but accessing the LEDs on the lower floors in the narrowest part of the wire channel is tricky. Foster used 15-inch tweezers and an endoscope to fix the lights during the build.

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