Miniature Monuments
BURBANK — From his converted workshop garage, Anthony Tremblay has a terrific view of Los Angeles City Hall--not to mention Iraq's Great Mosque of Samara and the Mayan Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl.
He also can see the ornamental windows on New York's Flatiron building, and the weathered limestone of the Great Pyramid of Khafre.
No, he's not operating spy satellites. Rather, the Burbank production designer spends his off-hours crafting these and other famous edifices, then selling the tiny metal-plated and bronze-cast creations to selected collectors and museums.
"It started off as a hobby but it's been snowballing into a part-time career," said Tremblay, whose miniature buildings are sold under a company aptly called Microcosms (small worlds).
Those who follow the nation's souvenir building market are the first to acknowledge the genre is by no means huge. And Tremblay admits he isn't quite ready to walk away from his day job as film and television set designer.
Still, over the last three years, his hobby has earned him enough profits to construct a workshop studio and plow money back into new equipment.
Moreover, the 36-year-old Tremblay is steadily gaining a reputation as one of the top miniature-building designers in the United States, according to David Weingarten, an Oakland-based architect who also co-authored a book on souvenir structures.
And part of his accomplishment has been perfecting a relatively new and low-cost production technique.
"Tony has moved the whole thing forward because he's made [the craft] accessible to people who would like to commission a souvenir building," Weingarten said.
"A few years ago, you had to be a bank to commission a piece because it was so prohibitively expensive. His method is simultaneously high-tech, low-tech and cheap."
Tremblay's Burbank home is almost a shrine to miniatures he has collected over the years--from intricately detailed pieces such as the Milan Cathedral to mass-produced pot-metal pieces like New York's Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building.
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It was his love of collecting and his inability to hunt down certain buildings that led to the formation of Microcosms three years ago: Tremblay collected more than 200 buildings but couldn't find souvenirs of Los Angeles landmarks.
"When I first started looking for souvenir replicas of Los Angeles buildings, there was nothing available," Tremblay said. "The first thing I wanted to do is put Los Angeles on the map."
