THE Golden Gate Bridge, Rome’s Colosseum, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Hoover Dam are all in one room — and they’re all made out of Legos.
They’re just four of the 13 incredible Lego Landmarks, all built by Adam Reed Tucker, 44, currently displayed at the Brick by Brick show at the Museum of Science and Industry in Illinois, the U.S.
Also featured in the collection are Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, New York’s One World Trade Center, the Ping An Finance Center in China, Missouri’s Gateway Arch, the International Space Station and San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania, a working rendition of America’s famed Six Flags American Eagle Roller Coaster and the Cinderella Castle from Disney World, Florida will be on display as well.
Tucker, one of only 14 Lego certified professionals in the world, had his own architecture practice in Chicago before he dedicated his work to creating with the toy bricks instead of computer, paper and pen.
It was a combination of the financial crisis, and the desire to return to working with his hands, that inspired Tucker to one day go to Toys R’s Us and fill up several shopping carts with Legos — returning to the medium he once loved as a boy.
“Creating art and sculpture, the freedom to create and explore my own vision of design without computer reliance, and to share architecture with the world all made this a natural move for me,” Tucker told the National Building Museum in 2010.
But Tucker also wanted to inspire and expand the public’s knowledge when it came to the architecture of the world’s most famous buildings, realizing how the September 11 attacks were keeping many people away from some of the country’s great skyscrapers.
“I thought it would be kind of neat to educate people on the engineering and the design that goes into these buildings,” he told Smithsonian Magazine. “And I really didn’t know how to go about it.”
“I thought, ‘Well, the brick as a medium could be kind of whimsical to offset the intimidating nature of architecture.’ It’s something that’s not typically thought of outside of its usefulness as a toy.”
Tucker doesn’t sketch or use computers to build his masterpieces, but rather relies on the “trial and error” of free builds from reference photographs.
“The process is a lot of designing in my head and then taking apart and then building again and then modifying, tweaking, adjusting,” he said.(SD-Agencies)
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