In 1975, the NASA Summer Study was conducted at Stanford University. The purpose of this event was the speculation about designs for future space colonies.

Several designs arose from this summit, and one of them took the name of the place it was being held: Stanford torus.

Although, the concept of a rotating wheel space station has previously been proposed by Wernher von Braun and Herman Potočnik, and even used in movies (remember 2001: A Space Odyssey), Stanford torus achieved to be a design on its own, and one of my favorites along O'Neill cylinder, whose design was used for the Babylon 5 space station of the homonymous series, which you can see in LEGO form in here, or for the Cooper Station in Interstellar.

Coming back to the Stanford torus, its shape is, as its name suggests, a torus (you know, a doughnut, but with its mathematical name), plus a central part (or hub) with mirrors to reflect light to the inside of the torus, which is attached to the torus itself via a number of "spokes".

You can get more information of the Stanford torus on its Wikipedia page.

For this LEGO version I have allowed myself a certain degree of license, to achieve a better looking model:

• Removing the central hub and the spokes which somehow distracted attention from the torus.

• Not closing the torus, via transparent panels, to allow a better view of the interior design.

The final model is rather small (not more than 32 studs in diameter), because of the parts I had available, but it proved to be quite a challenge in terms of design.

I hope you enjoy it!