 The Wange Flatiron Building is the second set of this brand that I bought after the Empire State Building. I already told in the Empire post how I discovered not only Wange but also BlueBrixx, both producers of sets made of bricks like Lego. Surfing the net to find a website where I could buy a Wange I opted for one that sold different brands, including Lego. Not knowing it and not knowing if it was reliable, I opted to buy a set that I liked but that wasn't very expensive. The Flatiron Building was perfect because it cost about €38 and at the same time it was a building that I liked. The choice of this set therefore came more from a necessity however I must say that it was a good one because immediately after I bought it, this set was removed from the site's catalog. The only thing that didn't convince me about the set was that the reproduction was also made of dark brown bricks, in reality the original building is all built in stone so it could be reproduced entirely with light brown bricks like the Empire. At the same time, however, there was the chance that those different colored grafts could give even more personality to the building but this was a detail that I could only discover after having assembled it. I don’t know where I first saw the Flatiron, probably in some magazine but when I visited New York for the first time in 2003, the building was one of the things I really wanted to see. At the time I was shooting with an analog compact Olympus and then, as a pioneer, with a Sagem phone, one of the first phones with which it was possible to take photos. I should have some photos taken in 2003 but during my return to New York in September 2009, I dedicated an entire morning to taking photos of the Flatiron with my first DSLR, the Nikon D70s. I fondly remember those moments where I not only immortalized the building from a reportage point of view but also managed to create fine art images when I didn’t even know the meaning of this word. The Flatiron it wasn’t just a triangular building, but rather a building that seemed to have a soul because depending on where you looked at it, it actually changed shape. These are details that I noticed in 2009, where walking around the various blocks, I could observe the Flatiron from different points. There was a perspective where the building looked like a giant sheet made of stone rather than paper. Over the years I have seen several buildings where the design was similar to that of the Flatiron but none of them ever gave the impression of changing shape based on the perspective. If initially the Flatiron had struck me simply for its unusual shape, after the 2009 visit I attributed to the building a sort of magical magnetism, where the building really came to life as in a film of magical arts. It goes without saying that another thing that can be perceived only by presence, is the size of the building, which is much more imposing than you think. The Wange Flatiron set consisted of 16 numbered bags for four steps, however after the first set of bags, I noticed that some pieces were still missing that were presumably in the bag with the next numbering. Initially this inconsistency made me worried thinking that the set could have errors but fortunately this was not the case. After assembling the base which, like the previous Wange, I found too weak and unstable, the construction of the building maintained a fairly linear logic. Basically, after placing the triangle transversally, the steps were to place it at the top alternating with the covering of the walls. These were assembled separately and then fixed. Only at the end, with the assembly and installation of the roof, did I assemble a component different from the others which otherwise were repeated. This does not mean that the construction of the Flatiron was easy or to be done without attention, even if I began to enter the logic of the instructions provided by this brand, the error is always around the corner and you must never lose concentration. In general, however, I made this assembly calmly and with curiosity and in fact I never encountered any difficulties. The Wange version of the Flatiron is certainly original and very beautiful, even the dimensions that I thought were small, in the end give a good idea of the building that gets noticed. Probably those bright colors that do not exist in reality give more of a toy tone than a modeling but I would say that they also have their charm and give personality to the set. Surely the design of the Wange reflects the nature of the real building and I must say that I like it even if it is more of an interpretation rather than a real reproduction. In conclusion, after having assembled the second Wange, I also promote this brand with full marks and before the summer I will buy at least two more new architecture sets, a category that is a strong point of Wange. Progress    Details    Gallery    A.M.
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