James May's Lego House
The Lego House was a full sized house built in the summer of 2009 using approximately 3.5 million regular lego bricks as part of James May's Toy Stories, a television series produced by Plum Pictures for the BBC. In the series James May, one the three presenters of the BBC's phenomenally successful Top Gear programme, set out to undertake ludicrously ambitious projects using classic toys. The series included the construction of a full size Spitfire model, a garden built of plasticene, bridging a canal using only Meccano, recreating and racing on a full sized motor racing circuit in Scalextric and reinstating the 10 mile railway line between two towns using Hornby 00 gauge tracks. The two storey lego house is the subject of the finale to the series and will be broadcast on BBC2 over the Christmas holiday.
Our idea for the house was that the overall building should be made by combining thousands of smaller houses, some with windows, some as roof pyramids and many simply acting as hollow blocks.
Initial components were fabricated on a 'mass build' day when over 2000 members of the public braved the torrential rain of a typical English summer day to assemble standard components. Then, over a period of about six weeks, a team of volunteers worked with a small building team to fabricate the remaining components and assemble them into the complete building.
There were numerous challenges that had to be addressed during the design and construction of the house.
One of the aims of the project was to see if Lego could be used as a proper building material. Our engineers, Atelier One, suggested creating LEGO joists that combined about ten layers of long bricks with a bottom tension plate made using LEGO plates. Prototype beams were built, tested, refined and tested again until we had a structure that could safely support James May and span over 2m. The architectural design of the house was based around this structural limitation and so we worked hard to create a spacious interior around small spans.
Having established that the maximum sensible height for a wall component was eight lego brick courses high we proposed a standard component design where 272 standard 'eighter' lego bricks were combined to make a hollow block.
The largest lego window brick is 40mm x 40mm x 8mm in dimension. We designed an assembly of these similar in size to the standard blocks and windows were created by building these into large apertures in the external walls. We also suggested the creation of several hundred custom wall blocks with their own windows. These created small peek holes in the building exterior.
Overlapping lego bricks were used to create a piano hinge system for hinging the doors. The doors were built course by course in parallel with the walls.
The British public donated a large number of bricks many of which were too small to easily use in the wall components and which were translucent or fully see through. All the 2x1 lego bricks ere put in a bucket, shaken up and then used at random to create translucent blocks that were then lad together to make a stunning stained glass window at the end of the staircase.
The roof of the building was conceived as a 'roofscape' of many smaller roofs. Our standard pyramid roof units were accompanied by a variety of custom roofs including a golden temple roof in yellow bricks and some ambitiously large long roofs.
The interior designer, Christina Fallah was commissioned to design a series of striking pattered furniture pieces and a variety of accessories and accoutrements for the house. She also came up with a very beautiful ârandomâ block pattern for the internal wall between the kitchen and living area.
The Lego house was used by James May for a single night in September and despite a huge public outcry and determined Facebook campaign to save it, it was dramatically demolished a few days later and the Lego put back in the box.
Interior Design: Christina Fallah
Lighting Design: Lightplan
Structural Engineers: Atelier One
