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Taking LEGO Modeling to the Second Floor

As Lego enthusiasts, we are well aware that modeling has been required ever since designers first began receiving inspiration, and builders delegated the task of bringing these artistic visions to life.

During the past three decades, Lego modelers have created miniatures of the US Capitol Building (see photo at right), the Taj Mahal (see photo, lower left), and an impressive array of other monuments aimed at glorifying man, and occasionally his gods.

With the recent release of the Lego architectural series, we have entered upon a new era, joining the most imaginative modelers the world has ever seen with the finest modeling tool ever invented.

However, even with man's impressive modeling history, with all the effort expended, there remains something missing.

For example, it is one thing to construct a model of Mark Twain's home (photos of real domicile and model). It is quite another to capture the essence of what makes the building important to the visitor.

In the case of homes, those few structures that have achieved the status of protected historical sites were so designated because of the power of the lives that ran their courses within them. Without great hearts to lend electricity to the structures, the dwellings, left to themselves, would have remained so many bundles of sticks, and so much mortar, destined for the wrecking crews once reasonable functional lives had been exhausted.

That is, a home becomes historically significant, not because it itself is unique, although that is sometimes the case, but rather because it was the dwelling or saw the creation of a publicly recognized, culturally important human being.

In the case of structures like the White House or Graceland (see images of Graceland, lower left, and a model of Elvis' birth home at the conclusion of this article), the numbers one and two registered historical homes in the US, much of the attraction of the properties revolves around places that are off limits to visitors, that is, the actual living spaces, most often located on the second floor of each site.

Whether it be the original Lincoln family spaces, which are nowhere to be found in the modern White House, or the personal spaces of Elvis' Graceland (office, body guard room, Lisa Marie's beautifully appointed quarters) it is the second floors that resonate with the hopes and dreams of those who occupied them; areas housing the private thoughts and feelings that made those who dwelled there important to us.

The same may be said of the Albert Einstein home in Princeton, New Jersey (see photo at right). Einstein, as we know, wrote his most important papers during the first two decades of the 20th century while working at the Swiss Patent Office.

However, Einstein's more philosophical and political works were composed in his study on the second floor of his Princeton home (see photo at the conclusion of this article). The second floor was also the site of Einstein's exhaustive work on the Grand Unified (or Unification) Theory. This is the same theory that Cambridge professor Steven Hawking has called The Theory of Everything.

For those modelers so inspired, the following is an animated YouTube video showing the upper floor of Graceland. Perhaps it will serve as a guideline for a new project:

To bring this all together, perhaps it is time for Lego modelers to consider creating a new kind of art, an art to capture not only what we can see of important structures from sidewalks and thoroughfares, but an art depicting the spaces that were most important to icons themselves.

Modeling for the purpose of suggesting the innermost realities of important cultural personages might be termed The Art of the Sacred.

Then again, perhaps modeling intimate interiors would be just another way for us to tell our own stories, that is, to expose our own dreams of princes and saints; a way of recognizing the life that reflects at bottom our own hoped-for greatness.

To that extent, The Art of the Sacred may be a gateway for the skilled artist/modeler to externalize the truly grand realities to be found, sometimes easily, and sometimes with a bit more difficulty, in every human soul.

It seems then that no matter how we proceed, we can only gain insight through the evolution of Lego modeling.

Thus we say Bravo to The Lego Group. Bravo to Lego modelers. And, Bravo for all the creativity we, as human beings, have to look forward to throughout the eternities, however we choose to react to the power of that idea.

Ron - Toy Tech

Thursday, 11:05 pm | August 20th, 2009

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