![]() ![]() All of these virtual wonders can be uploaded and enjoyed later on an accompanying app. There are recording booths for making your own stop-motion animation, and racing car components waiting for you to click a vehicle together and hurtle it down a ramp. The growing city adapts to whatever buildings visitors add, introducing young minds to such concepts as the logic of zoning.Įlsewhere, guests are challenged to save a population of woolly mammoths stuck in the Arctic ice, using a fleet of Lego Mindstorms robots, or invited to create a school of colourful fish to be released into a digital aquarium. You can try your hand at town-planning, Lego-style, with a digitised population of Lego mini-figures eagerly awaiting the arrival of housing, offices and green space, projected on to big model tables. Like everything Lego, it’s not cheap, with tickets costing 199 krone, or £24, for adults and children alike.īranching out … the Tree of Creativity rising through the stairwell. First, you’re taken on a journey through 13 galleries, cleverly designed to appeal to kids and grown-ups, with just the right mix of interactive tech and traditional brick-based fun. In the world of the Lego House, though, everything is awesome. “We grew too quickly,” says Knudstorp, fiddling absentmindedly with a pile of bricks. ![]() ![]() After years of untrammelled growth, the first half of 2017 saw revenue fall by 6%, leading to the announcement of 1,400 job losses earlier this month, 8% of the entire workforce. The opening of the Lego House comes at an awkward time for the brand. Guests have to save some woolly mammoths stuck in the Arctic ice – or make fish to be released into a digital aquarium In an eerie touch, Lego security cars also glide around town, as if waiting for some spectacular cartoon crime scene from The Lego Movie to erupt. It is now busy building housing for its employees, as well as a vast new HQ, similarly envisioned as a stack of toy blocks. It can sometimes be tricky to separate the company from the town: it was Lego that built the airport in the 1960s and it recently founded its own international school here, based on “playful pedagogy”. It is fitting that the Lego House now stands on the site of the former town hall (which became redundant after municipal functions were recently consolidated), and Knudstorp says it is the centrepiece of a wider masterplan, on which BIG is also working, for Billund to become “ the creative world capital of children”. Photograph: Iwan BaanĪs the employer of 4,500 of the 7,000 citizens of Billund, the company has an interest in the future of the place. Visitors come to the Legoland and Lalandia theme parks, but they rarely venture into town.” “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. “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. A row of skylights, resembling the circular studs of Lego bricks, allow you to peer down into the building at the marvels within – chiefly a row of three huge dinosaurs howling with rage because, as keen observers will notice, they’ve each trodden on a piece of Lego. At two of its corners, the big blocks appear to melt, plunging down to form cascading steps, encouraging you to clamber up on to the colourful terraces that spiral up to the summit for views across the town. This staggered pile of shiny white blocks, built just metres from the redbrick house and workshop where the family-owned company began in 1932, is the ultimate embodiment of the Lego brand. His buildings sometimes feel a little flat, more sheen than depth, but for a temple to Lego that couldn’t be more appropriate. Rarely have architect and client been so well matched, given Ingels’ trademark brand of cartoonish quips, and his penchant for blocky forms. Photograph: Iwan Baanįor his first foray into bricks, Ingels couldn’t have landed a better commission – even if these are not actually bricks at all, but ceramic tiles clipped on to a steel frame. Shark warning … the terraces have been turned into playgrounds. ![]()
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