Lego The Wonderful World of LEGOLAND Model Building Page 1
BACKGROUND INFORMATION 4
The Wonderful World of LEGOLAND
®
Model Building
Model Designers Creators of the LEGO
®
World
Buildings, animals, and figures made from more than 50 million LEGO
®
bricks are to be
found everywhere in LEGOLAND Deutschland. In the course of three years, everything
was planned, conceived and built 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. Six of these model designers today
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 creating new LEGO figures and buildings.
Before the members of this German-Danish team (which includes a woman) began
working in their dream job, they had been active in various occupations including
window dressing and the wholesale and retail business. You need no qualification 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, precision, and manual and
technical skills. At the end of their tour of the LEGO Factory at LEGOLAND
Deutschland, visitors may take a look at the Model Workshop and watch model
designers at their work.
The Steps of the Process From LEGO Brick to Finished Model
A model designer begins his work by making a drawing, which is 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 on 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
are used as well. To model tricky architectural elements such as cupolas or the
complex shape of a dinosaur, specialists use computer software specifically developed
for LEGO which maps these elements in LEGO format.
