In downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, on 13th Street just south of O Street, there’s an awesome historic building that stands out from the others near it. The name carved into the stone near the top of its from simply identifies it as the “Telephone Building”, but it’s been the home of lots of non-telephone-related businesses during the time I’ve known about it. Its Wikipedia page states that it was built in 1894 for the Nebraska Telephone Company, which explains its name.

View of the front of the Telephone Building

I used to walk past it sometimes when I was a student at the University of Nebraska, and I took a few bad pictures of it before I moved away so I could have a record of what it looked like. I always thought it would be fun to build a model of it, and after Lego introduced the Modular Buildings theme in 2007, I had the template I needed to make it happen. But it still took a long time to actually build it – I eventually started planning it in around 2017, and finally built it in 2023.

Model render in stud.io

I wanted to make my building compatible with the normal Modular buildings, which presented two challenges:

  1. The real Telephone Building is very monochrome, unlike the normal line of modulars
  2. The real Telephone Building is rather skinny, with an alley along its north side

I decided to just embrace both of these features, as can be seen in the above stud.io render. I designed the building using a ton of sand yellow/dark tan pieces, which evokes the bricks used in the real building, and I added a small curb with modular connection points on the far side of the alley. This leaves a bit of empty space to the side of the building, and that makes a great place to park 40586 Moving Truck, which came along as a freebie when I ordered the parts from Pick-a-Brick.

The Lego model under construction

I didn’t put any interior floors or decoration into my version of the building, partly because I’ve never seen the inside and don’t know what it looks like, and partly because I was cheap and lazy. Because of that, construction went pretty quickly. I did run into a couple of spots where my stud.io design wasn’t as structurally sound as I imagined it would be and I needed to make some on-the-fly fixes, but overall it ended up nearly identical to the original design.

The completed model

Done! There have been a few minor adjustments since this photo was taken – I have replaced the grey arched windows with black, for example – but this is essentially its final state. Sometimes I end up tweaking things like this over time, but I think this one is pretty solidly done.

The completed model with the Detective Agency modular

I’ve always thought that long lines of Lego’s official modular buildings linked up to each other looks like a jumbled mess, so the ones that we have displayed around the house are generally separated from each other. But with an alley separating them, I like the way these two look together. My Telephone Building is a bit more true to the original building than to the modular design, which I think adds a nice differentiation too. I’m pleased with how it turned out.