Lego House is a 12,000-square metre building filled with 25 million Lego bricks in Billund, Denmark, located near Legoland and the headquarters of The Lego Group. It is also known as Home of the Brick with reference to Billund, where Lego originates. Visitors can experience a variety of activities during their visit, including physically and digitally building with Lego bricks, programming robots and animating models. The centre’s visitor experience includes four experience zones, two exhibitions and the Lego Museum, which showcases the history of the Lego brand and company. Lego House has been recognised for its innovative design, which aimed to reflect the Lego brand. The building incorporates 21 staggered blocks that resemble Lego bricks, with nine roof terraces containing children’s play areas.
The house was designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group and was inaugurated on 28 September 2017. The building is owned and maintained by Lego System A/S. The inspiration for Lego House originated in the Lego Idea House, which is located on the main street in Billund. The idea for building Lego House was conceived from a desire to share the company’s history and values, whilst also inspiring visitors to play and interact with Lego bricks. In addition to its concept as a visitor centre, Lego House was also created to offer a communal urban space to the local community, due to its central location in Billund, with many areas of the complex, such as the roof terraces, having been designed to be entirely free to enter. For this reason, all of the public facilities, such as the shop and restaurant, were planned to be accessible from a free public area on the ground floor of the building.
The Mini Chef restaurant offers visitors a unique experience that presents menu items coded to correspond with Lego bricks, which are used to build the meal and scanned to send the order to the kitchen. The meals are then delivered by robots on a conveyor belt. Lego House was designed to resemble a pile of 21 white Lego bricks that have been built on top of each other. The building consists of a series of interconnecting modular spaces, which house the exhibition and experience areas for visitors. The entire construction consists of 8,500m² above ground and 3,400m² of basement space. The modular spaces can be visited by the use of a series of stairways, ramps and bridges, however, each was designed to be used independently.
Experience zones
Lego House was designed to offer a variety of experiences to its visitors, which include building and playing with Lego bricks, interacting with technology and being creative. To achieve this goal, four colour-coded experience zones were created, each giving the visitor a unique experience. Each coloured zone represents a different aspect of interaction, with red representing creative competence, green representing social competence, blue representing cognitive competence and yellow representing emotional competence.
The Blue Zone features the Test Driver, a 60-minute experience aimed at 1st to 3rd grade children, which teaches children how adding weight can make a Lego vehicle go faster. The Robo Lab also provides the opportunity to direct a robot by using coding commands to build a number of steps. This experience is designed to enhance cognitive competence.
The Green Zone includes the Story Lab, a 60-minute activity, which involves writing and directing a stop-motion movie. It was created for 4th to 6th grade children. This experience is designed to enhance social competence.
The Red Zone is dominated by a huge brick waterfall and offers free building opportunities with Lego bricks. The waterfall was designed to symbolise the never-ending flow of Lego bricks, used 2 million bricks to construct, and took about 29 weeks to complete. The zone incorporates several large vats of Lego bricks and features the Lego House Zoo, a 60-minute activity, in which 1st to 3rd grade learners can build animals from Lego bricks. The zone also includes the Art Machine, an experimental 60 minute activity aimed at 4th to 6th grade learners, which involves the use of Lego bricks and a pen and the Creative Lab. These experiences are designed to enhance creative competence.
The Yellow Zone features the ‘Fish Designer’, a 60-minute activity which is aimed at 1st to 3rd grade children and involves building fish out of Lego bricks and releasing them into a digital fish tank. This activity aims to enhance emotional competence. This concept is based on the LEGO Life of George concept which allowed users to create physical models from bricks and turn them into digital ones. The Fish Designer activity achieved a ‘Visual Media Experience Award’ from ‘SXSW Innovation Awards’ for achieving “content creation and delivery that moves beyond passive viewership by providing a more immersive and engaging entertainment experience”.
Tree of Creativity
At more than 15 metres tall, the Tree of Creativity is a huge Lego model located in the centre of Lego House. It was designed to look like a realistic tree and was built from 6,316,611 Lego bricks, making it one of the largest Lego structures ever built. The builders took 24,350 hours to assemble the finished structure. The Tree of Creativity spans several floors and can be viewed from a variety of levels and angles by using the spiral stair that wraps around the structure
Masterpiece Gallery
The Masterpiece Gallery is situated at the top of the complex and is an exhibition of Lego constructions created by adult fans of Lego (AFOLs). It is intended to be a tribute to the creativity of both adults and children. The gallery is the location of three large dinosaur models, each built from a different system of Lego bricks, Duplo, System and Technic. The dinosaurs are three metres tall and were each constructed of between 50,000 and several hundred thousand pieces.
Stuart Harris, Senior Designer at Lego House said, “We wanted to create some unique and breathtakingly iconic models. At the same time we wanted to create opportunities within the house to showcase the incredible creativity and diversity of the AFOL community”
Lego Museum
Lego House is also home to the Lego Museum, a visitor exhibition that showcases Lego sets that have been released throughout the company’s history. In the lower floor History Collection, visitors can immerse themselves in the company’s brand and timeline. The complex is also the home of the Lego Vault, which is located underneath Lego Square and offers visitors the opportunity to witness the first unopened edition of every Lego set that has been produced in the company’s history
Roof terraces
The roof of Lego House was also designed to be used as a visitor experience. The roof terrace features nine creative playgrounds for children, each offering its own unique play experience and also offers a 360° panoramic view of the city. The nine playgrounds were created by Monstrum and were inspired by images on the front of Lego set packaging. Each playground was designed to offer a different adventure scenario, such as a semi-submerged submarine battling with a sea monster, a shark attacking surfboards and a space shuttle blasting into space
Lego House has been recognised for its innovative design and also for its interactive visitor experience. The Good Design Awards recognised Lego House in 2018 in the Environment category. The building’s architecture was also recognised by the Civic Trust Awards in 2019. Lego House, along with Bjarke Ingels Group, also won the INSIDE World Festival of Interiors Awards in 2018 in the Civic, Culture and Transport category. The building received recognition in the TEA Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Brand Center category. Lego House was Popular Choice and Jury Award winner in the Architizer A+ Awards 2018. The building’s design achieved the Danish Design Award 2018 in the Feel Good category for its design, “which in an intuitive way succeeds with its dissemination of the company and the philosophy of the brand – and at the same time is a colourful tribute to the Nordic tradition of cooperation, innovation and lifelong learning”. Time for Kids listed Lego House as one of the World’s 50 Coolest Places 2019. The Michelin Guide awarded Lego House two stars in the green Michelin Guide 2019, commenting that, “Lego House is an experience not to be missed. A five-zone playground that invites children to use their creativity and ingenuity with their parents”. A documentary entitled Lego House-Home of the Brick won prizes in two categories in the Cannes Corporate Media and TV Awards 2018.
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