The other day, in the comments to the Rhombicosidodecahedron, casperyc invited me to make a Menger sponge, after I offered to make him a geometric model that was not yet in my MOCs list. I never heard of Menger sponges, but casperyc provided me with a few links:

• A wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menger_sponge
• this beautifully Lego design : https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/vwzawk/level_3_menger_sponge_made_out_of_lego/
• Two designs in Rebrickable in regular Lego. One here by 2in1, and the other one here by Doctroid.

I wrote a Workbench post about my first efforts, which do not at all look like this model. My main problem with those first designs, was that they are not scalable. Let me explain. Menger sponges are fractals, which means that they can be repeated ‘in themselves’ so to say. Take 20 of these level 1 Menger sponges and you can make a level 2 sponge. Take 20 of those to make a level 3. And so on.

If this is a model of a fractal then that such scaling up should be possible. However, the first designs ( which are much smaller level 1 Menger sponges ) would not keep together if one would go to high repetition levels. I believe that the design that I am presenting here can go pretty far, and I am planning to publish a manual to explain how to do that. It’s rather simple, but I wonder if Studio and my laptop can deal with the 32.000 bricks for a level 2 Menger sponge, or the 600.000 for the next level.