Science World's Towers of Tomorrow LEGO exhibit challenges heights of creativity
Credit to Author: Stephanie Ip| Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 19:02:41 +0000
If it’s been a while since you’ve let yourself run wild with creativity, Science World’s Towers of Tomorrow LEGO exhibition might be just the thing for you.
“It changes when you grow up, you sort of lose that fearlessness to just go ahead and build something when you play with LEGO now,” said Jesse Brydle, curator and program specialist at Science World at Telus World of Science.
But Brydle hopes the new Towers of Tomorrow exhibit can help adults and children alike let their imagination soar.
The Towers of Tomorrow exhibit features 20 LEGO models of skyscrapers from Canada, the United States, Australia, Asia and the United Arab Emirates. The structures include the Wilshire Grand Center in Los Angeles, Chicago’s Willis Tower, the Shanghai Tower and the Burj Khalifa from Dubai.
The exhibition uses more than 500,000 Lego bricks and over 2,400 hours to build. All the buildings are on a scale of 1:200.
“I think LEGO really brings out the creativity that all of us naturally have inside of us and it provides us an opportunity to really release that creativity in unimaginably diverse ways,” said Brydle, adding that every LEGO exhibition that has shown at Science World in the past has been wildly popular.
“This one is architecture, but we’ve had transportation and dinosaurs interpreted through the lens of LEGO. So the possibilities are just endless.”
Australia’s Ryan McNaught, one of only 14 certified LEGO professionals in the world, is the master builder behind the towers. McNaught and his team were responsible for building the towers and ensuring that the towers were installed properly for the Vancouver exhibition.
Certified lego professional Ryan McNaught is pictured at Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Wednesday, January 22, 2020.
Of the buildings featured at the exhibition, McNaught said the Shanghai Tower was the hardest to build.
“It’s shaped like a guitar pick or a rounded triangle, which twists as it goes up so it was really difficult to build out of Lego bricks.”
Each of the towers featured are shown alongside display cards that give the specifications of each tower’s real-life counterpart as well as insights from McNaught on how the tower was built.
Brydle was on hand to witness the installation coming together and said he only had a brief chance to meet the full-time LEGO builder.
“Working at Science World is a lot of fun – but boy, there’s a few jobs that I envy and that’s one of them,” Brydle said.
Towers of Tomorrow is included with Science World admission. The exhibit opened on Friday and is on display until Sept. 7, 2020.
–with files from Canadian Press