Ultimate LEGO® Architects Build-a-World at Crown Hall

  • Museum educator Margy Stover sketches one of the design schemes used to provide visual interest to the Build-a-World ground plan.
  • The Core Design Team discusses colors for the ground plan. The Team chose colors that would complement the bold primary hues of LEGOs and represent a wide variety of natural features.
  • Each design scheme is traced onto a 6’ x 6’ canvas panel. It took 18 rolls of canvas and 10 gallons of paint to create the 3,000-square-foot ground plan.
  • The grid layouts were outlined before color was added.
  • The free-flowing forms on these panels provide contrast to the geometric grids of others.
  • Design team members complete the waterway and surrounding roads of one panel.
  • Created over a two-week period, the Ultimate LEGO Architect Build-a-World landscape provided a foundation for the world of hundreds of LEGO buildings.

July 24, 2010

In preparation for the Ultimate LEGO Build-a-World event at IIT’s Crown Hall, Museum Educator Margy Stover and her Core Design Team designed and crafted a unique 3,000-square-foot ground plan. The team, made up of students from the Chicago Academy for the Arts and several of the Preservation Trust’s Junior Interpreters, worked for two weeks to create the base on which a LEGO environment was built. Each team member developed a design scheme, incorporating a town square, Mies van der Rohe’s grid system for the IIT campus, and a crop circle. Every aspect of the ground plan was discussed and decided upon by the group, from appropriate color choice to the placement of each layout in the overall plan. The team traced the designs onto 6’ x 6’ panels, then painted them to create a vibrant backdrop for Build-a-World’s LEGO architects. The completed foundation functions as the landscape upon which children placed their LEGO creations.

From the ground plan to the completed cityscape, Build-a-World was envisioned as a chance for youth to bring their creativity to the architectural ideas of scale, proportion and space. On July 24, over 1,000 people worked to incorporate their buildings into the surrounding landscape, using the ideas Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered over a century ago.