LEGO® Architecture: Form Follows Fun

by SweisKloss
June 3, 2021

We all loved LEGO® bricks as a kid…and without question still do. It’s a classic toy treasured by the most avid of fans, and LEGO Architecture has a serious following. There are websites and blogs devoted to “brick architecture” written by self-declared “brick geeks.” One can easily find sites listing which architecture sets are coming out and which are retiring. ArchDaily, AD, and Dezeen —to name a few publications—did articles highlighting LEGO sets that have taken brick architecture to great heights.

Did you know that LEGO Architecture put out not just one Frank Lloyd Wright model set but at least a half a dozen, including Fallingwater, the Robie House, and the Guggenheim Museum? There was also Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House in Los Angeles, complete with detailed landscape design. The Villa Savoye (designed by Le Corbusier in collaboration with his cousin, architect Pierre Jeanneret) brick set was a sought-after model.

Other LEGO sets included structures of specific architectural styles, such as Neoclassical, Art Deco, Prairie, and Bauhaus. Newer sets consist of city skylines with iconic buildings from all over the world. All these architecture models have hundreds of pieces to create wonderful reproductions. It’s a fun activity for many but especially for budding architects.

Ask any designer, architect, and builder, and they will tell you that as a kid they loved whatever they could get their hands on that could be designed, engineered, built, taken apart and rebuilt. This might be why LEGO Architecture summer camps are so popular in lots of cities.

ACTIVEkids has LEGO and structural building camps throughout Los Angeles. They have experts who will help campers build a variety of ancient to modern structures, from castles to stadiums to wherever their imagination goes. While working on these projects, LEGO architects will “learn about arches, cantilevers, compression, tension and other real engineering and architectural concepts and terms.”

So, if you’ve been thinking about what the kids could do, one week of LEGO time is a great option. For more info on the camp, click here. Now, if only they had a LEGO architecture summer camp for adults…