World’s first LEGO museum is coming
The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) will also draw up a master plan for the Smithsonian museum and research complex
Topics: Hyperallergic, Art, Architecture, Smithsonian, lego, Museums, Entertainment News
The Bjarke Ingels Group (or BIG), the Danish architecture firm helmed by its namesake, is getting even bigger. New plans to create a LEGO museum and rethink the campus of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., signal that the buzzed-about firm is on the cusp of becoming the world’s next big starchitecture outlet.
BIG’s Storefront LEGO installation (Image via good.is)
BIG, along with fellow firms Ralph Appelbaum Associates and COWI, has been tapped to design the first public museum for LEGO, the iconic building-block company that was also founded in Denmark. LEGO already has its own theme parks, complete with roller coasters and giant LEGO models, but the museum will include an integrated education program and activities that showcase the range of the simple block system. Construction is set to start in 2014, with completion by 2016.
The fortuitous combination of BIG and LEGO goes beyond a shared nationality. Ingels called the opportunity a “great dream” and said that he owes “a huge personal debt to the LEGO brick,” citing its role in “developing the child as a creative, thinking, imaginative human being,” according to World Architecture News. In 2007, BIG created a 250,000-piece LEGO model at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture, a gesture that seemed to respond to criticisms that the firm’s work was just blocky modularity (Ingels and his firm are also known for their sense of humor).
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