Lego House, Billund
I can confirm that Lego House, Billund, Denmark is pretty amazing.
he world’s biggest LEGO tree, planted in LEGO House in Denmark. 15 meters tall, made from more than 6 million LEGO bricks, and built by hand, the LEGO Tree of Creativity took almost 25000 hours to complete.
Opened in Sep 2017, it has various zones for building lego embracing games and imagination:
you can shoot your own films, build mini-figs (and take photos), build flowers (and take selfies), build animals (and put them on a vibrating landscape), build cities (and put buildings in an interactive landscape); play on a rescue mission lego robot machine;
see a Lego manufacturing machine and receive a unique combination
It also has an exhibit on the history of Lego, which is fascinating as it explores family, place, culture values but also a corporate turn-around and soul-searching.
There is also a dog taking a wee.
You can see the Lego House website here.
A review of it from the Guardian. It notes " This gleaming ziggurat of fun is the new Lego House, a mind-blowing mecca for fans of the iconic construction toy, designed by BIG, the firm led by young Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Now heading up a New York-based global empire, working on everything from Google’s new California campus to a Chinese energy firm’s HQ, Ingels sees the project as a homecoming.
“We have finally graduated as Danish architects,” he says proudly. “We have made a brick building – without breaking the brick module in a single place.” Ingels is referring to the rule, particularly observed by meticulous Danes, that you should never cut a brick to fit with your design, but configure the design to fit the brick instead."
And "“This had to be a place where even the most hardcore Lego fans would say, ‘Wow!’,” says Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego CEO, who has been credited with turning the company around after it almost went bankrupt in 2004. “But it’s also about trying to revitalise the town centre, which has been left behind by all the development on the edge of the city, out near the airport. Visitors come to the Legoland and Lalandia theme parks, but they rarely venture into town.”
Here is the making of the Tree.
If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try: Ursula K Le Guin on literature as an operating manual for life; Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure. Or Charlie Munger on always inverting.
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