One of the most eagerly anticipated buildings of 2017 opened last month in LEGO’s hometown of Billund, Denmark. LEGO House, designed by Bjarke Ingels’ firm BIG is ambitious and innovative and took over fours years to build. This 12,000 feet visitor experience centre, is designed to celebrate all things LEGO, and to provide a space for children and adults alike to create using the famous little plastic bricks.
Brick by brick
LEGO House consists of 21 supersized LEGO shaped bricks, stacked on top of one another. The design is crowned with a keystone block, with the proportions of a 2×4 LEGO brick, which cleverly makes the whole building recognisable as a LEGO brick from Google Earth.
The 21 blocks which make up the building are staggered to create public and accessible rooftop spaces and also allow natural light inside. The house is filled with over 25 million LEGO bricks, and externally the textured clay tiles of the building give the impression that it’s constructed by millions of real LEGO bricks.
Stepping inside The ‘Home of the Brick’
Visitors to LEGO House can expect to be fully immersed in the world of LEGO, before they even enter the building. The huge, white building blocks, each contains its own brightly coloured patio, featuring many weird and wonderful installations, including a shark, a submarine and a camel. The patios can be accessed from a pair of ‘pixelated’ staircases, which allow visitors to scale the exterior of the building.
The building itself is split up into four ‘experience’ zones, colour-coded according to the different aspects of a child’s development. The red area is for creativity, the blue for cognitive skills, green for social skills and yellow for emotional skills.
Inside, a LEGO tree rises up through an atrium, wrapped by a staircase linking floors containing LEGO dinosaurs, and entire LEGO cities. The top floor of the building hosts the Masterpiece Gallery, a space dedicated to some of the most ambitious creations made by LEGO fans. The gallery is illuminated by eight skylights in the shape of the connectors which are found on top of the toy LEGO bricks which all adds to the innovative and playful feel of the house.