I know I have done Lego POWs twice before (see the Lego house, and the Lego Architectural Series, and I skipped this Lego art installation) but this one takes the cake. This one supersedes any playful architectural Lego work you've ever scene before. This project uses Legos as the permanent facade of the Cowley St. Laurence Church of England Primary School in London. What_architecture originally used Legos to help explain their building concepts when the client was having a hard time reading the conventional drawings. This sparked the idea to continue using the toy bricks in the actual design. The architects held numerous sessions with students from the school and had them design little figures or icons with the bricks. They then translated those to the drawings to arrange into the facade. Originally it was supposed to be in color as seen in this rendering but with too many colors of Legos to choose from and a desire to keep it timeless, they opted for the black and white version.
The bricks are built in front of a cement backer board, screwed in every couple of feet by a standard Lego piece with a pre-made hole. That piece then gets a Lego cap piece to hide the screw. The facade is ventilated by a grouping of the pre-holed pieces at the top and bottom of the wall. The result was 1.2 million Lego pieces put into place by students and volunteers. The architects also worked with 3M to create a coating for fire, anti-fungal, and UV protection. Hurricane wind loads... probably not! That would be 1.2 million tiny projectiles around here.
So, seeing as how it can't get much more impressive from here, I promise to refrain from anymore Lego posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment