Category:Lego Architecture

Ever since they started making the brick sets, the Lego company has always always been strongly interested in architecture, which is not surprising as

• Lego is a brick-centric system,
• Lego is not cheap, and parents who buy it for their children often feel that they are making an investment in their child's development and future.
• The profession of architect is highly respected and many parents would love the idea of their child growing up to become one, and
• A number of famous American architects attended Kindergartens and were influenced to think geometrically by Friedrich Froebel's block-based toys designed to boost children's intellectual development.

If Frobel's blocks could encourage children to become architects, then why not Lego?

The 1962 catalogue

Browsing the catalogue for 1962 it is notable how many photographs there are of strikingly large models of real cutting-edge architecture, even though there are no obvious products in the catalogue to go with them.

Another theme in the catalogue is the (perhaps slightly unrealistic) suggestion that adults could use Lego to design and model their dream home in 3D, before actually setting out to build it for real.

1963: Modulex

An immediate shortcoming of Lego for architectural models was that, since that the bricks were proportioned more like housebricks, and a Lego "1×1×1" brick was 8mm×8mm×9.6mm, a height-to-width ratio of 1.2, trying to work to real-life dimensions was something of a nightmare, involving heavy use of a pocket calculator and a great deal of frustration.

Lego's answer to this was the Modulex 20 range - a smaller-scale system designed to a strict 5mm grid, with unit blocks that were cubes 5mm on each side, and which ... if they were taken to represent 10cm in real life, gave buildings that were to the standard architectural 1:20 scale.

LEGO Architecture Hobby and Model Box

Three sets – 750, 751 and 752 – supplied with graph-paper and a cardboard ruler with multiple scales, for checking the real-world dimensions of your building.

2008 Lego Architecture range

2013: Architecture Studio (21050)

In 2013 Lego decided to have another bash at the architecture theme, with Lego Architecture Studio.

The set was a large white box containing a wide range of differently shaped useful bricks, all in white or clear, and selected for their usefulness in making models of modern buildings. The price was ratehr high per brick, partly due to the inclusion of a thick and rather expensively produced book of inspirational photographs and suggestions. While Lego Architecture studio was aspirational, most people found it difficult to justify the cost: if one was buying plain white bricks in bulk, why should the cost be higher than normal? While Lego produced very useful multi-colour packs of handy shapes, what was missing form the range was any way of simply buying bulk bricks in a single colour: say, white or pale grey.

While AS at least let people buy quantities of bricks in white, Lego arguably missed a trick in not producing an extension pack that could have contained just the bricks and not the book, for people who has the AS set and now wanted to buy lots and lots of bricks without paying through the nose for multiple copies of the book, or to allow customers simply to buy a big box of plain white and clear bricks.

2014 onwards

External links

• Lego Studio 21050 (lego.com)
• Lego Architecture history (lego.com)
• 21050 Architecture review (fbtb.net)