The Stone Lantern is a traditional piece of Japanese architecture, and thousands of them exist throughout the islands of Japan. They come in an extensive variety of shapes and sizes. Each kind of lantern has a name, and each part of their construction has a name. Originally a symbol of Buddhism, some have lit the way for travelers for over two thousand years.

I’m no expert on them. If you’d like to know more a quick internet search should be able to tell you far more than I can. I simply admire them, so I made one out of LEGO bricks.

My simplest build so far, it amounts to only five pieces.

The picture above shows the five pieces used to make the Stone Lantern. The parts go together with the leftmost on the bottom, and each part after that going on top of the part to its left. (It’s a pretty simple build.)

As I said there are a wide variety of stone lanterns. Here are five types I made. I’ve barely even scratched he surface of how many can be built with LEGO bricks. Since taking this picture I’ve thought of a few more types I could’ve made with pieces that came to my mind, but if I made every one I could think of I wouldn’t be doing much else today.

Below you’ll find my most pointless LEGO Digital Designer file yet! It exists though, so might as well post it. It does contain the five models in the picture above, and you can view the part number of a piece in the file by clicking on it, so maybe it’s not completely pointless. Enjoy!

LEGO Digital Designer File for “Stone Lantern”