On the outside, the Lego models of the New York and Shanghai skylines look unremarkable. But start unpacking them, and remarkable secrets emerge about how Lego has turned around a business that had a near-death experience at the beginning of the 2000s.
Not long after the Lego brick had been named the Toy of the Century by Fortune magazine, the company reported the biggest loss in its 70-year history. A new leadership team came on board and pulled off “one of the most successful business transformations in recent history”, says David Robertson, author of Brick by Brick, a history of Lego.
Within a decade, the company was flying high, with massive annual growth and new product lines arriving at a dizzying pace. Its Technic range of iconic car sets and the Architecture series of the world’s great buildings, in particular, have given Lego new appeal among adults who had grown up with more basic sets.
According to the Play Well Study 2020, conducted by the Lego Group, 77% of adults experience feeling overwhelmed at least once a month – and 73% say that play offers them relief from everyday chores and worries.
“We know from a lot of research that play is crucial for a healthy childhood and development, where we learn most naturally by exploring the world around us through play,” says Genevieve Capa Cruz, audience strategist at the LegoGroup. “It has now been shown that more and more adults are realising that play is an integral part of their whole life, which helps to develop their abilities but also refresh their minds and keep them relaxed, not just as children but also throughout adulthood.”
New categories like the Creator series and Lego Art have been specifically designed to meet this need, but it is in Architecture and Technic that adult play comes into its own. Last week, Lego showcased its new products in all four of these ranges to media from Russia, Middle East and Africa – and lifted the lid on some of its trade secret.
We spent some virtual time with Rok Zgalin Kobe, chief designer of Lego Architecture, who began working with the group while still practicing as an architect in Slovenia. He is credited in Brick by Brick with designing Lego’s iconic Big Ben Clock Tower Kit while still an outside “partner”.
Read more on the next page about Kobe’s design process.
He then took over from the originator of the Architecture series, Adam Tucker, an architect who had come to Lego’s attention through highly detailed constructions using available Lego kits. Big Ben was practically his audition.
“I didn’t go through the regular selection criteria for designers,” he confesses. “I came in through the side door, because I was drafted for my freelance expertise in architecture in general. At the time the Lego Architecture studio was a big box of white bricks, which had a book explaining architectural principles and how they relate to Lego. I was in academia, I was doing my PhD at the university at that time, so I had a really good insight into the theoretical part of the architecture. I was running my own firmwith my wife at that time, but I was also a fan of Lego.”
And there was one further element, which has been at the heart of Lego thriving for much of this decade: a massive focus on innovation.
“Just like architecture in the real world, they tend to push the limits of what’s feasible, construction-wise and material wise all the time,” says Kobe. “We have our own internal committees which preside over what is legal, but we tend to push the envelope all the time within Lego architecture.
“Every Lego architecture set has something special in the way it is built. For example, in the Shanghai skyline, we have the twisting tower, where we have just used projecting brick that’s being repeated 60-odd times. And then it is just twisted and it’s held internally by a flex cable. So the whole structure, top to bottom, is held together by an internal element. But we were able to achieve these curves which we wouldn’t be able to achieve by just stacking regular Lego bricks.”
Kobe’s enthusiasm grows as he talks through various iconic models. The New York skyline in particular hides many tricks of the Lego trade. Aside from miniature models of structures, separate “giant” models of the likes of the Empire State Building have also been created. This has allowed Kobe to explore the architecture of these buildings in ways not previously possible.
“A big Empire State Building was able to capture a lot of the original traits of the original architects and the original structure of the building. The inside of the building is not simply constructed out of varying bricks, but it actually has a purpose. It showcases the original building so that the actual substructure of the building is really good steel, just like on the original. I hope that, for people who are building thatmodel, it creates a stronger connection with the original building.”
Read more about other iconic buildings available in Lego.
Then there is the miniature Chrysler Building in the New York skyline kit, which reveals another secret of the Architecture range: “For the Chrysler Building, I was able to recreate the iconic top with only a few pieces. They are actually made of Lego teeth and claws from other models, but here serve as the metal archways on top.
“My design philosophy with this line is that it is only created with the existing elements. So that means that we’ve never made a special mould for the Lego architecture series. It can be easy for us to create an element that would look exactly like the top of the Chrysler Building, but that would completely defeat the purpose, which is to show the versatility of the Lego system in play.”
The flame of the Statue of Liberty, he reveals, is actually a woman’s hair from another set.
“I have a strong conviction that everything that we can imagine, we can actually recreate using the existing bricks. And we have proved that time and time again with ourArchitectures. So all you see here is just existing pieces that are repurposed in new ways, that are built in such a way that they haven’t been built before, so that they can represent a new shape.”
These back stories serve another unintended purpose: they bring the models to life in an innovative way that has rarely been associated with child’s play.
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee