“For a certain set of artists and thinkers, Legos are not mere child’s play, but objects of both abstract and formal perfection.”
When Bjarke Ingels, the visionary leader of the Danish architectural firm BIG, first heard about the competition to build the Lego House, a museum and activity center near the toy company’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, he gathered his staff. “If there was one building that BIG was founded to build,” Ingels announced, “this is it.”
For Ingels, Lego proportions have a mystical perfection that “borders on the Da Vinci code.” Like most enthusiasts, Ingels refers to them as “bricks,” not “Legos”; he doesn’t see them as toys, but as tools for “systematic creativity.'”
Some LEGO history:
“When Ole Kirk Kristiansen founded Lego in 1932, the company made wooden toys, but after World War II, it switched to plastic. The Lego brick as we know it today was developed in the mid-1950s. From the start, it was a feat of classic Scandinavian design: clean, practical, reliable and somewhat revolutionary with its “clutch power,” which made it easy to snap and unsnap. Today, Lego enthusiasts marvel that those first Legos still fit perfectly with the current ones, and that six identical eight-studded bricks can be combined in more than 900 million ways. “The human condition is, sadly, divisive,” the British television host James May said on an episode of his show “Toy Stories,” on which he explored a full-size house he built entirely out of Lego bricks. “But there are simple spiritual experiences that unite all of humanity in unqualified communal joy: sex, the dance, foot massage — and to those I would add the simple sensation of pressing Lego bricks together.””
I don’t think I posted this video of James May’s Toy Story that shows how a battalion of volunteers built him a LEGO house. Here is a short clip of the results.
Gunsmoke and Knitting 