LEGO Icons 10326 Natural History Museum’s olive green hue has received a mixed reception from the community – but are these alternative colour schemes any better?
A new LEGO modular building is upon us, and – like clockwork – so too are the grumblings over its colour scheme. It’s a no-win situation for the LEGO Group: few modular buildings can satisfy everyone, and there’ll always be someone taking issue with the particular colours chosen no matter which direction the designers take. For 10326 Natural History Museum, Chris McVeigh opted for olive green, dark tan and white.
It’s a classic mix of colours that keeps things muted while not draining the building entirely of colour (as a brown, tan or grey palette might), but olive green is still proving a contentious choice for those who have been around long enough to remember its use in 10243 Parisian Restaurant. Others have called it out for having ‘haunted house’ vibes, meanwhile, presumably with 10273 Haunted House in mind.
The question now is: would anything else have looked better? One enterprising redditor has already rolled out a few variants thanks to the magic of Photoshop, giving us some idea of how 10326 Natural History Museum might have looked with different hues.
Grey 10326 Natural History Museum
First up is a suggestion floated among various corners of the community so far, stripping out the colour to give us a classically-grey building. The results are… okay. You can see why so many people are calling for grey in that it maybe looks a bit more realistic for a museum, but should realism be the order of the day in a LEGO city? Previous LEGO modular buildings have all made plentiful use of colours, whether bright, muted, pastel or otherwise, and taking a sharp turn away from those in 10326 Natural History Museum would have felt jarring.
Blue 10326 Natural History Museum
LEGO designer Anderson Grubb originally considered launching this year’s 10312 Jazz Club in dark blue rather than dark red, and the next recolour for 10326 Natural History Museum takes that suggestion and runs with it. Dark tan around the ground floor is swapped out for sand blue, better complementing the otherwise dark blue exterior. It’s nice, but not especially fitting for a museum.
Red 10326 Natural History Museum
If not blue, how about dark orange? This looks slightly more fitting for a museum, but runs into a similar problem as olive green in reusing a colour originally deployed in another modular building. The result is even more severe here, though: dark orange has featured twice before in 10224 Town Hall and 10269 Corner Garage, and the former set is also fronted by grand white pillars. Orange is okay, but maybe a touch too familiar. (Also: that base colour looks like sand red to us, which was axed from the LEGO colour palette a long time ago.)
Green 10326 Natural History Museum
That brings us back to olive green and dark tan, the colour scheme ultimately settled on by Chris McVeigh. This is the one you’re going to have to plump for if you’re not prepared to make a few modifications to the official set (read: swap out a sizeable number of the pieces), so fingers crossed you like it if that is the case. And if not, let us know in the comments which other colours you’d like to see 10326 Natural History Museum in – we might just be able to make it happen.
10326 Natural History Museum is
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