LEGO: Wonders of the World

If you get a chance, it is definitely worth going to see the LEGO: Wonders of the World exhibition (on at the Auckland Museum until 13 May 2018) even if you don’t have children to take along. Who knew you could make the Mona Lisa out of LEGO! Or such amazing replicas of the Taj Mahal and St Basil’s Cathedral! Even a very passable version of Michelangelo’s David!

My brother and nephews were enthralled by the engineering and construction aspects – how long did it take to build? how many blocks did it use? what sets were the blocks from? did it need a frame to keep it upright? And there were details of all of that for those who were interested along with pictures and information about the original structure.

I was captivated by the artistry of it all, the sheer beauty of them, and the amazing skill in making such spectacular scale models of so many of the wonders of the world. They were so ‘life-like’ and with so much detail that it was truly hard to believe in many cases that the models were made with LEGO. Most were small scale models of the real thing but the Mona Lisa was much bigger than the original: the pixels were blown up so that they could be replicated using small LEGO blocks and it gave a very different perspective (that I quite appreciated having been somewhat disappointed by the small size of and the crowds surrounding the original).

Although Michelangelo’s David could not be as spectacular as the original, it was outstanding the way they had used the ‘texture’ in the bricks to recreate the musculature to give quite a realistic effect. Similarly the robes in the Christ the Redeemer Statue were shown to good effect.

I went expecting to see the Seven Wonders of the World (I have had a strategy of using these to choose where to travel next – with just the Christ the Redeemer Statue left to see) and there were three of the seven there (Great Wall of China, Christ the Redeemer Statue, and the Taj Mahal). The exhibition includes some of the ancient Wonders of the World such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Lighthouse of Alexandria, Temple of Artemis and of course the Great Pyramid of Giza. Along with these are many of the well known monuments and buildings around the world (including the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Notre Dame Cathedral, Arc de Triomphe, Big Ben, Oriental Pearl Tower, Brooklyn Bridge, St Marks Square in Venice, Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building) and other iconic structures such as the Titanic, the Concorde, the VW Beetle, Stonehenge.

As well as the main structural details, there were amazing and often humorous details to match in each of the models, right down to hot dog stands, pizza delivery men, cars on the bridges, skeletons in the closet, building and repair works, druids at Stone Henge, Guy Fawkes at Big Ben, lifeboats and flotsam and jetsam around the sinking Titanic. All of the detail was from LEGO pieces (although I was told some must have been specially made as ‘that piece doesn’t come in that colour’), and even though it looked ‘formal’ at first glance, there were often hilarious variations on the original and cutaways of the interiors told their own stories.

There were a few unexpected ‘structures’ such as the Crown Jewels (quite good), Faberge Eggs (disappointing) and even the Great Barrier Reef (clever but not a good representation in my eyes). Overall I thought it was a fantastic event (although the lighting wasn’t great in places). Crowds are controlled by only having a certain number of tickets for each hour – we took nearly 2 hours to look around.

You could appreciate the exhibition on many different levels:

• seeing how many of the wonders you had seen in real life or appreciating them for the first time;
• being in awe of the number of hours and the number of pieces it took to make things (and not always what you’d expect: St Basil’s had 71,689 pieces and took 320 hours to build, the painting ‘A Sunday on la Grande Jatte’ had 180,000 pieces and took 103 hours, and the sinking Titanic had 133,900 pieces and took 248 hours);
• looking at all the relevant figurines and appreciating the humorous details;
• children could count the number of a particular character they saw across all the exhibits;
• you could try your hand at your own versions of some of the pieces;
• there were also videos on how the models were constructed