Lego House

After Koldinghus Dorte and I took Lucas, Linnea and Magnus and went to the Lego House in Billund. This is also known as 'Home of the Brick'. The idea to build this came from a desire to share the history of the company, whilst at the same time inspire the visitors to play and interact with Lego bricks.

There sure was a lot to do, but we will get to that later. There was also a lot to look at! Lots of builds, in many different themes. The photo of Linnea and I is taken in the Masterpiece gallery for example. A big room filled with Lego creations made by adult Lego fans.

Our favourite part of Legoland has always been the miniland, so we spent a lot of time having a good look around in the immense Lego minifigure model landscape called The World Explorer. It was bursting with different storylines, scenarios, fairytales and other stories.

There was also a lot of pop cultural references. Linnea was excited to find a little bit of the Harry Potter universe, and also the Friends fountain and sofa.

This portrait of the actress Samira Wiley was done with 41,000 bricks. It is called Pieces of Me, and its an exploration of how play influences our journey to self-discovery and self-expression.
Look at her hair and blouse, they are made with a special 3D building technique called "greebling". Also the rainbow part of the portrait is built with transparent elements, so that the light can shine through the bricks and "glow" when lit from behind.

We had a lot of fun with our own portraits too! Can you see this is Dorte and I?

Then we got into the playing, creating and building!
Here for example, you were supposed to build a bee - and then set it free, maybe mounting it on the large podium in the middle of the room.

The focus!
It was actually a lot of fun, and it was super inspiring to see all the other bees created.

Here we were building flowers:

The house was separated into different colour zones. In the Yellow Zone we got to develop emotional skills and express ourselves. In the Blue Zones we worked with more cognitive skills, solved problems. The Green Zone stimulated social skills and in the Red Zone the creativity got complete free reign.

The most fun thing with all these builds was that we could see them come alive. For example here, we had built 2D fish, and then we added them into this machine, and they would pop up on the screen in the big blue aquarium!

In another part we built Lego characters, and they got brought to life on a digital dance stage. Check out this clip:

We finished off with a visit to the basement where the History Collection was, the official Lego Museum. It showed the whole history of the company, how it happened that a small carpentry workshop in Billund became one of the largest toy brands in the world.

And when we had finished our visit for the day and were ready to leave, we each got a memento from our day, a bag with 6 red 2x4 bricks.
A mathematics professor once calculated that the number of unique ways to combine these bricks is an incredible 915,103,765. So each guest to Lego House get their own unique combination on a card with their bag of bricks. This was mine:

 

How cool!
This was a great experience, and a perfect alternative (or addition) to a visit to Legoland. We all enjoyed it, I don't think there is an age limit on a visit to this Lego House. A super creative and fun afternoon!