Welcome to the Temple
I’ve been building this for months, kinda. I originally I assembled some complex and fiddly gates using lots of gold pieces, and left it standing alone for about five weeks before beginning to tinker with walls and shapes. Mostly I blame a trip to the London Lego Store where I picked up a huge number of coral pink quarter-circle tiles, and all the other times I gorged on sand green bricks. The whole front section came first, mounting the hideously fragile gates with right-angle skeleton arms, and then spreading up and out with as much lovely gold Lego as I could convince myself to use. There are cups, weapons (many light sabre hilts and sais) and taps hidden in there somewhere… I learnt some new things, like the lattice window frames can be jammed into the underside of arches, as well as laid flat on top of bricks with studs through them. 
It’s built around a tight octagon, which seriously stressed the hinged plates at the bottom, so I was cautious about building on top of it. Eventually I connected them lightly using jumper plates, and later ensured they were all attached to each other, if not the base… I’ve been admiring sideways built shapes for ages, and done little to practice myself, but the green “brick profile” bricks in the walls are all assembled sideways, using lots of headlight bricks to fit them together with long tiles, and to attach the vertical 2×12 plates which fill in the gaps. After that it was just a lot of greebling… with many changes to make it more uniform in colour, which I think has worked out pretty well. I’ve relearned a few things about how many plate widths apart headlight bricks need to be in order to lay other bricks and plates across them, but I still have to refigure it out each time (not that bright).
The steps at the front were fun to make, with a series of the tiles that have flat upright walls fitted together. Nice pattern! I’ve also finally made foliage I really like – again, thanks to pick-a-brick walls I’ve got tonnes of the individual green leaves which here are attached to lots of the small plant leaves, in turn hanging out of the old and new flower stems (with and without bar), and all those are attached to the sea grass pieces at the front. I think they tumble in a pleasingly organic way, without being quite as fragile as I expected.
Once more I’ve built something that it’s impossible to photograph the inside of properly. One day! Thankfully, I made the rear of the temple entirely removable so I could work on it, which provides a lovely view of the tiled floor, and allows me to turn the back wall around so you can see it below. I used the only good sand green minifig I have, the LEGO Atlantis Barracuda Warrior who has delighted me forever.
So, pretty chuffed! I have nowhere to put it…
A slightly higher resolution gallery can be see here.
