Brick City: Lego at the National Building Museum

Remember when Lego was a kids’ toy that parents liked to play with, too? As you’ve probably noticed it’s become a BIG thing in other ways these days, and now it’s a major exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

A large gallery is filled with landmarks from around the world, pieces of our collective ‘mental geography,’ picked out in an amazing assortment of shapes and pieces that didn’t come with the sets our kid played with.

These were built by a UK-based Lego artist (bet you didn’t know that was a thing!) named Warren Elsmore, who, the signs said, “skillfully chooses the ideal bricks to recreate well-known landmarks using an encyclopedic knowledge of every shape and color ever manufactured.”

Leaving Europe and America for a bit…

Another market, this one in London…

And on to Las Vegas…

Napier, New Zealand was rebuilt after a 1931 earthquake; it’s known for it’s full-on Art Deco streetscapes

Some monumental buildings, ancient and nearly ancient…

By now you may be wondering about the huge Lego building in the title image, and I’m ready to share. It is, of course, the St Pancras station and hotel in London, one I’ve often described as “my favorite pile of bricks.” Built in the 1860s to designs by Sir George Gilbert Scott, it is still a busy station, and the UK terminus for Eurostar trains.

Several times threatened with demolition, it was saved by public campaigns and eventually restored and the station expanded. The model, which includes working trains, is over 12 feet long. It took Elsmore about 500 hours and uses over 180,000 bricks.

Of course, not everything can be that big, and we return to a smaller scale…albeit with the technical feat of creating Lego flowers.

More very famous buildings; Buckingham Palace is the only one with non-standard pieces—Lego created special character bits for the Queen and her family.

If you’ve got the time, you can try out your own construction, although in about half an hour of enjoyable fiddling I produced nothing resembling a recognizable building.

Two buildings of similar proportions, but vastly different size. Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik, Iceland is 244 feet tall, while Abraj Al Bait in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, boasts the world’s tallest clock tower at 1300 feet. No little people with that one; by proportion they would be 0.1mm tall!

Hallgrimskirkja—12 hours, 850 bricks / Albraj Al Bait—30 hours, 1850 bricks

For our final two, we turn to Paris for two projects that aren’t actually buildings. It took Elsmore 14 hours and 900 bricks to make his Mona Lisa; you really have to stand all the way across the room from it for its best effect, but the painting is so well-known that it’s instant recognizable in its fully-pixelated form.

The last image was our One-Clue Mystery this week. It took 30 hours and 1500 bricks to make this drone’s eye view of the Arc de Triomphe, Place Etoile-Charles de Gaulle and the twelve avenues radiating out from it. It’s a tricky image, but not tricky enough to fool George G, who solved it again this week.