Over a five-day period last month, as part of the Milan Expo 2015 in Italy, a slim tower made from more than 500,000 Lego bricks rose to 35 meters (114.8 feet), setting a new Guinness World Record as the tallest structure built with those familiar acrylic bricks.
Denmark-based Lego Group donated 7 Euros (US$7.752) for every centimeter of the tower to Urban Oasis, an urban protection and development project connected with the World Wildlife Fund.
That tower offered one more example of the role that Legos have played in the worlds of construction and creativity since the company’s founding in 1932. Last month, Lego Group, the company that makes the toy bricks, established its Lego Sustainable Materials Centre, and announced that it would invest 1 billion Danish Krone (US$148 million) for research, development, and implementation of sustainable raw materials to make Lego bricks and packaging.
In the documentary, Bjarke Ingels—whose eponymous firm is based in Copenhagen, Denmark—notes that, because of its harsh climate and high labor wages, much of what gets built in that country must be prefabricated to shorten the construction time.
The company has also teamed with Warner Bros., Interactive Entertainment, and TT Games to release an interactive video game that allows players to use Lego building sets digitally to build and create “wherever their skills and imagination roam,” says its press release.
“Our goal is to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow,” said Lego Group’s owner Kjeld Kristiansen. “We believe that our main contribution to this is through the creative play experiences we provide to children.”
On July 31, a documentary film called "A Lego Brickumentary" will be released in the United States. Its narrator, the actor Jason Bateman, says it’s a story “about a simple toy and how its unique properties ushered in a new era of creativity for a whole generation.”
Along with a host of inventors and toy aficionados, the film interviews such Lego lovers as Facebook’s cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and Houston Rockets’ center Dwight Howard. Also featured prominently is starchitect Bjarke Ingels, who recounts how he won one of his first commissions by designing a model using Legos.
In the documentary, Ingels—whose eponymous firm is based in Copenhagen, Denmark—notes that, because of its harsh climate and high labor wages, much of what gets built in that country must be prefabricated to shorten the construction time. “In a manner of speaking, Denmark has become a country entirely built out of Legos,” he says in a clip of the film that Wired magazine posted on its site.
The Lego Group chose Ingels’ firm to design its Lego House, a 12,000-sm (129,167-sf), 23-meter-tall educational center in Billund, Denmark, whose purpose, in Kristiansen’s words, is “give us the opportunity to show how children learn through Lego play, and at the same time we can tell the Lego history in an involving way which reflects our values. Lego House is scheduled to open next year, but in the interim Lego Group will send a 1:100 scale model to six different fan events around the world. The model—built from 18,000 Lego bricks, of course—was seen by about 20,000 people who recently attended the largest Lego fan exhibition in Switzerland.
Related Stories
| Dec 5, 2013
Translating design intent from across the globe
I recently attended the Bentley User Conference in Vejle, Denmark. I attended the event primarily to get a sense for the challenges our Danish counterparts are experiencing in project delivery and digital communication. One story I heard was from a BIM manager with Henning Larsen Architects in Denmark, who told me about a project she’d recently completed overseas in the Middle East. She outlined two distinct challenges and offered some interesting solutions to those challenges.
| Dec 3, 2013
‘BIM for all’ platform pays off for contractor
Construction giant JE Dunn is saving millions in cost avoidances by implementing a custom, cloud-based BIM/VDC collaboration platform.
| Nov 27, 2013
Exclusive survey: Revenues increased at nearly half of AEC firms in 2013
Forty-six percent of the respondents to an exclusive BD+C survey of AEC professionals reported that revenues had increased this year compared to 2012, with another 24.2% saying cash flow had stayed the same.
| Nov 25, 2013
Electronic plan review: Coming soon to a city near you?
With all the effort AEC professionals put into leveraging technology to communicate digitally on projects, it is a shame that there is often one major road block that becomes the paper in their otherwise “paperless” project: the local city planning and permitting department.
| Nov 22, 2013
Kieran Timberlake, PE International develop BIM tool for green building life cycle assessment
Kieran Timberlake and PE International have developed Tally, an analysis tool to help BIM users keep better score of their projects’ complete environmental footprints.
| Nov 8, 2013
Can Big Data help building owners slash op-ex budgets?
Real estate services giant Jones Lang LaSalle set out to answer these questions when it partnered with Pacific Controls to develop IntelliCommand, a 24/7 real-time remote monitoring and control service for its commercial real estate owner clients.
| Oct 30, 2013
Why are companies forcing people back to the office?
For a while now companies have been advised that flexibility is a key component to a successful workplace strategy, with remote working being a big consideration. But some argue that we’ve moved the needle too far toward a “work anywhere” culture.
| Oct 30, 2013
11 hot BIM/VDC topics for 2013
If you like to geek out on building information modeling and virtual design and construction, you should enjoy this overview of the top BIM/VDC topics.
| Oct 18, 2013
Meet the winners of BD+C's $5,000 Vision U40 Competition
Fifteen teams competed last week in the first annual Vision U40 Competition at BD+C's Under 40 Leadership Summit in San Francisco. Here are the five winning teams, including the $3,000 grand prize honorees.
| Oct 18, 2013
A picture’s worth a thousand words… if you can find it
Photographs are becoming more essential to project communication and documentation. Recently, I sat in a local airport integration project meeting in which the owner outlined their expectation for construction documentation. One of the first requirements was to provide photographs throughout the building process.