- The diorama contains over 150 million Lego blocks, and is 2,060 square feet.
We’ve previously addressed the sky-high pricing for Legos these days. They’ve gone from a ubiquitous gift for kids to a serious investment for parents. When someone sets a World Record for the size of a Lego display, it’s a big announcement that this person is rich. Or, in this case, a museum.
Kids museums have the best stuff.
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The story comes from Shenzhen, China, where the Smaerd Land children’s museum smashed the previous record for the biggest Lego display. The stats, for those who are working on something in their basement with aspirations of one day holding a Guinness title: the display measures over 2,060 square feet and took over 150 million blocks to complete.
Over 40 designers and engineers worked for three years on the project as a part of the museum’s Blocks Kingdom exhibit. The full exhibition includes Lego animals, an outer space battle heavily populated with Star Wars Legos, and reconstructions of famous world monuments.
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There’s also a 1:1 scale main street with kid-sized Lego people, so you can experience what it’s like to be living in a block world yourself. For connoisseurs, they have a wall with Lego figurines from over 1000 collections.
Everything you want in a Middle Earth.
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The ‘Lord of the Rings’ diorama earned the record all on its own. It displays as much of Middle Earth as the movies cover, including the Shire, Mordor, Rivendell, Helm’s Deep, and Minas Tirith. There’s even a Smaug lurking and a carefully constructed Lego-lava flow within the walls of Mordor.
You have to be a little jealous of the people who spent the last three years of their lives creating a massive, finely detailed Lego-brick expression of Middle Earth. Working for Lego is no joke of a job; they recommend multiple bachelor’s degrees and a master’s in engineering or a related field. Plus art classes and bilingual skills since Lego sends people worldwide to build dioramas and displays.
Photo by Omar Albeik on Unsplash
For most people, competing with museums for this kind of record isn’t financially feasible. That’s before considering the amount of space it requires. But that’s not to say it’s not worth it to start your own massive project. Working with Legos, even as an adult, is better than doom-scrolling your social media.
If you’ve planned on turning your unfinished basement into a game room, take advantage of the open space by collecting Lego sets to make a block world of your own.