Lego's core demographic might be six- to 12-year-old boys, but that means little to the legion of grown-up Legophiles, known as Afols (Adult Friends of Lego). Afols are a burgeoning brigade. Each year they attend Lego conventions and discuss all things Lego. No doubt there have been Afols since the Denmark-based company began pressing out interlocking plastic blocks in 1949.
Over the decades, many a child has had his Lego bricks hijacked by a parent eager to construct a towering edifice on the living room floor. Chicago-based architect Adam Reed Tucker was one of those children. He played with Lego from dawn until dusk as a child, creating fanciful worlds and alien spaceships from the little bricks. Ironically, despite coming from the city where the skyscraper was born, Tucker rarely made buildings from his Lego pieces. That came later.
While working at his small architecture firm, Tucker started playing with Lego again. His first creation was a two-metre-high model of the World Trade Centre, following the September 11, 2001 attack. 'Initially I wanted people to understand what happened during the attack; I intended to show people how the twin towers collapsed,' he says. 'But instead the model became a celebration of the magnificent construction and engineering.'
He asked the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago if it would exhibit his model, but it refused, believing it would be too sensitive a subject. However, the National Building Museum in Washington took it on. Buoyed by the response, Tucker began creating huge Lego models of other landmarks, including San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid, the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Chicago's Marina City and the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai. Using at least 100,000 Lego bricks and taking about two months each to complete, the one-off models were created from scratch and without the assistance of computer-aided design, or glue.
Tucker intended selling them to the owners of the buildings to display in their lobbies as sculpture. Instead they became part of a travelling exhibition, showing (until September) at the National Building Museum. While Tucker was making the models, his architecture firm fell victim to the economic downturn. 'I was down to my last US$5,000 of savings,' he says. Just in time, Lego saw what Tucker was doing and approached him with a bold idea: could he create a line of similar buildings that people could buy and make themselves at home?
And so was born Brickstructures, a collaboration between Tucker and Lego to design construction sets for adults, featuring the great architectural icons of the world. Tucker's first designs were hometown favourites by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill: the John Hancock Centre and Sears Tower (officially Willis Tower since 2009), currently the tallest building in the United States. At last, adults had a valid excuse to play with Lego. Here was a Lego product specifically made for grown-ups in black skivvies and serious spectacles. Plus there was a certain cachet to having guests turn up to find the Sears Tower assembled on your credenza.
The sets became highly sought after by design addicts. For a start, they were in another league from the standard Lego we had come to know and love. Even the shiny black boxes are a quality item, with line-drawing plans and architects' signatures. Inside is a manual with a detailed history of the building plus architectural notes. Tucker provides an explanation as to why he chose the particular building and the challenges he faced rendering it in Lego.