Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9706
Architecture ■ ■ ■ ■ When Barnaby Gunning was a youngster, he, like so many children, played with LEGOs, using the small, colorful, plastic bricks to build a multitude of objects. Who would have imagined that, many years later, he would be playing with LEGOs once again, only this time using millions of them to construct a life-size, multi-room house—including a kitchen, bath, living room, and bedroom, complete with fi xtures and furniture, and all made with none other than LEGOs. Gunning, a principal at Barnaby Gunning Architects in the UK, designed and helped build the LEGO house for the BBC television series James May’s Toy Stories, in which ambi- tious projects are created using popular toys. T e project, however, was far from child’s play, requiring a great deal of digital design work and planning before construction on the unique structure could begin. Always up for an adventurous project, Gun- ning received a call several months ago from a former colleague who told him about the TV crew’s plans. “As architects, we are interested in systems and how you can construct build- ings,” Gunning says of his fi rm. He spoke to the series’ producers and was surprised when, a few months later, he received a phone call asking him to join the eff ort. As if building a house from LEGOs wasn’t challenging enough, the project was ham- pered even more so due to the broadcast. “It’s one thing to build a house in which the time scale is sort of determined by deliverables, but with a TV show, the whole thing has to be juggled around their [fi lming] schedule,” Gunning says. From early discussion to air- date was just three months—not even enough time to construct a regular house. T is home, however, was far from “regular.” Because the clock was already ticking for the TV producers, they had ordered the LEGOs for the project before Gunning signed on—approximately three million of them, which equated to a week of produc- tion at the factory. “T ey ordered the stan- dard LEGO bricks online,” says Gunning, “350,000 of this one, 250,000 of that one….” To determine the amounts, the crew built a toy-scale house (about a foot long and fi ve to six inches high), and calculated the number of bricks that would be needed if that model were scaled to full size. As to not infl uence Gunning’s design, the small model—a single-story house with a roof and terrace—was not shown to the architect and his fi rm. Moreover, when the designer met with the TV presenter, James May, he was pleasantly surprised that the host did not dictate specifi cs of what he wanted in the building, but rather left it up to Gun- ning. “He wanted us to build a house made of LEGOs, not just make a model of a house,” adds Gunning. “Oftentimes LEGOs are used to build a representation of something else. So the obvious thing would have been for him to say, ‘Here is a house I like, make it out of LEGOs please.’ ” He did not do that, much to Gunning’s delight. May’s hands-off approach was ideal for a number of reasons. “LEGOs are a construc- tion toy, and you can’t just scale up some- thing,” says Gunning. “And when you start making something at full scale, the nature of the full-scale [object] will be determined by the building material, in this case LEGOs. We needed to fi nd out what we could do and not do with LEGOs, and then determine how to put three million bricks together in less than three months’ time.” (Left) Architect Barnaby Gunning used Luxology’s Modo to plan the LEGO house; (above) the completed structure at the building site. Design Concepts When Plum Pictures, the series’ production company, had approached Gunning, the LEGOs had not yet arrived. To get an idea of what he would be dealing with and to de- sign the unusual structure, the architect made a virtual LEGO set within Modo, Luxology’s 3D modeling and sculpting software. “I al- ways use computer modeling as a way to test out ideas,” says Gunning, whose previous projects include the British Museum Great Court, T e Esplanade T eatre Shells in Sin- gapore, and numerous private houses in the UK. “I am of the generation of architects who April 2010 33