Architecture

Shanghai

The Skyline set where the whole reason to buy it is one impossible-looking twisting tower.

Brick Rated Score

4.2/5

Set 21039 · 2018

Pieces597

Minifigsn/a

Year2018

Set number21039

Check price on Amazon

Affiliate link. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

The verdict

The Shanghai Tower is the reason this set exists, and once you build it you understand why.

Every other Skyline set feels a little flat next to the way this one climbs from tiny temples on the left up to that spiralling glass giant on the right. It is the tallest, widest, heaviest Skyline LEGO made, and for once the price tag feels earned. If you like a build that teaches you something, this is one of the good ones.

Best for: Skyline collectors who want the one build in the series that actually surprises you

The full review

What it is

This is the Shanghai Skyline set, part of the LEGO Architecture line, and it captures eight of the city's landmarks in one long, low display piece. You get the Chenghuang Miao and Longhua temples, the Radisson Blu, the Bund waterfront, the Oriental Pearl, the World Financial Center and, standing over all of it, the Shanghai Tower, all sitting on a baseplate with the Huangpu River curving through and a printed Shanghai nameplate on the front. The whole thing rises like a real skyline, shortest structures on the left, tallest on the far right, and it reads beautifully on a shelf. What got me is that it does not feel like a token skyline. It feels composed.

The catch

I will be straight with you about the money and the practical side. At its original 59.99 dollars it was one of the pricier Skyline sets, and now that it is retired you are looking at closer to a hundred for a sealed one, so this is no longer an impulse buy. The other honest caveat is stability. Those tall, thin towers look wonderful but they wobble if you lift or shift the model, and they only feel truly solid when the thing is sitting still. A couple of the buildings also fall short of their real-life shapes. The Oriental Pearl base is plain, and the World Financial Center never quite gets its famous silhouette.

Who it's for

If you already own a few Skyline sets and want the one that actually does something new, get this one. Builders who came out of it said it was probably the best in the series, and I understand why, because the Shanghai Tower alone justifies the box. If you are brand new to Architecture and want something cheaper to test the water, one of the smaller city sets will serve you better first. And if you only care about pin-sharp accuracy on every single building, a couple of these will nag at you. For everyone else, this is a lovely, slightly clever display piece.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is more varied than you would expect from a set that is mostly tan, grey and clear pieces. Each of the eight buildings uses its own approach, so you are constantly switching techniques, and there is a lot of studs-not-on-top work and some really tidy jumper-plate usage holding it all together. It runs to about sixty to ninety minutes and never gets boring, mostly because the moment you finish one building you are onto a completely different method for the next. The temples ask for delicate detail, the skyscrapers ask for patient stacking, and it all builds toward the one section everyone remembers.

That section is the Shanghai Tower, and it is the standout piece story here. It is a stack of 57 thin 3x3 Technic curved half-beam liftarms threaded onto a central Technic axle, with two soft axle hoses used to twist the whole column into that gentle spiral the real tower has. Watching it turn from a straight stack into a corkscrew is the single best moment in the build. Beyond that showpiece, the value is solid for a 597-piece set: plenty of small clear elements, useful curved slopes, and the printed nameplate tile that finishes every Architecture set. It is not a parts-pack bargain, but the technique you learn from that tower is worth more than the piece count suggests.

Fun facts

01The real Shanghai Tower, completed in 2015, is a 127-story building where each floor is rotated slightly less than a degree from the one below, which is what gives it that twisting shape the LEGO version recreates with flex hoses.
02With eight distinct buildings, this set packs in more individual landmarks than any earlier Skyline model, and it is the tallest, widest, deepest and heaviest of the whole Skyline series.
03The set ran from 2018 to the end of 2020 and is now retired, and it was later re-released in China, an unusual second life for a discontinued Architecture set.
04The Shanghai Tower it depicts is the second-tallest skyscraper in the world, beaten only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.