BACKGROUND INFORMATION 4
The Wonderful World of LEGOLAND
®
Model Build ing
Model designers creators of the LEGO
®
world
Buildings, animals, and people, made from a total of more than 50 million standard
LEGO
®
bricks, are to be found throughout LEGOLAND
®
Deutschland. Everything
was planned, conceived and built over a period of three years by 140 model
designers at Billund, Denmark (the headquarters of the LEGO Company), to be
ultimately transported to the new LEGOLAND park in the Bavarian town of
Günzburg. Today, five of these model designers form the team of full-time model
builders operating at LEGOLAND Deutschland. Since the park was opened in May
2002, they have been responsible for looking after existing models and the
ongoing creation of new LEGO figures and buildings.
Before launching into their dream career, the five members of this team - two men
and three women - had been active in various other occupations. You do not need
to be qualified as an architect or engineer to be a model designer. What you do
need, however, to create true-to-life models of buildings, is imagination, manual
and technical skills, and three-dimensional awareness. In the Model Workshop of
the LEGO Factory at LEGOLAND Deutschland, visitors can watch the model
designers at work.
The steps of the process from LEGO brick to finished model
A model designer begins his work by making drawings, which are normally based
on photographs taken from all conceivable angles as well as on ground plans
where buildings are concerned. Even the minutest architectural detail is copied
onto special LEGO drawing paper on which a square represents the size of a knob
on a LEGO brick. Most models in LEGOLAND Deutschland are built on a scale of
1:20, but other scales can also be used for single-theme areas, such as
Neuschwanstein Castle or the new Allianz Arena. To reproduce complex shapes
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