We've seen a lot of interesting lego creations over the last couple years, but nothing like this. Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu were inspired by Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher who is most famous for his so-called impossible structures. “I'm very fond of Escher's work, and I wondered for some time whether it would be possible to produce a plausible rendering of any of his pictures in LEGO bricks,” says Lipson.

The piece above is a LEGO recreation of M.C. Escher's Balcony. The duo took 16 separate shots, zoomed in on distinct parts of the model, and glued them together as a mosaic panorama.

Relativity – “Unlike many of Escher's other ‘impossible' pictures (like ‘Ascending and Descending') , there is actually no optical illusion involved here. Gravity seems to be working in three different directions simultaneously, but the picture shows a perfectly self-consistent physical scene.”

Waterfall – “We actually resorted to photographic manipulation for this one. We took two photographs of the model; one with and one without these channels, but from the identical viewpoint. The final image was constructed by very carefully overlaying portions of the left image with the corresponding portions from the right.”

Belvedere – “The domes on top, and the slightly protruding cell wall at the near end of the bottom level, were both interesting exercises in half-brick spacing – using full brick increments we just couldn't get the resolution at this scale to get the domes to look at all rounded, but with half-brick increments it looks vaguely reasonable.”

Ascending and Descending – “The picture has to be taken from exactly the right place, and the final photograph was slightly distorted to emphasize the perspective effect.”

Andrew Lipson's website