Have you wonder how Lower Manhattan looks like in LEGO bricks? Well, wonder no more my friends because, Ryan ‘Brickman’ McNaught has created a stunning installation of The Big Apple in all-white LEGO bricks and boy, was it a sight to behold. The installation, Lower Manhattan in LEGO Bricks, was part of Brickman’s latest LEGO brick exhibition in collaboration with LEGO CITY entitled Brickman Cities. Here’s what the exhibition is about:
“The exhibition focuses on some of the world’s greatest Cities, explores their history with LEGO® bricks and then invites you to build them into the future with millions of LEGO® bricks- We’re also really pushing the envelope with this exhibition and built something very different that combines classic fun Brickman models in a more intimate, immersive setting, with cutting edge technology.”
Needless to say, the centerpiece of Brickman Cities is this: a 3 by 4 meters (9.84 x 13.12 feet), 1:500 replica of Lower Manhattan, built entirely in white LEGO elements. We love the all-white model that reminiscent that of a professional scale model of a city. But that’s the idea; the reason why white LEGO elements were used exclusively was that so that Projection Teknik can 3-D project stories of New York directly onto the model with UHD 4K projectors.
“The story takes visitors from the days of the First People’s villages amongst the swamps of the river delta right up until the present day. To integrate 3D projection technology with LEGO bricks like we have is something I never thought was even possible, let alone for it to tell such a cool story.”
It took McNaught a whopping 572 hours and over 210,000 pieces of white LEGO to bring this massive installation to life. Besides the time spent, the preparations for the build was not a walk in the park either. A custom rig has to be built and mounted to the ceiling of Brickman’s workshop to project a modified image of Google Maps onto the LEGO baseplates to exact scale for McNaught to build the buildings and streets to the right proportions.
In addition, Brickman had painstakingly studied each and every one of the 800+ buildings in order to get the scale heights and dimensions as accurate as possible. After McNaught was done with the model, another 200+ hours were devoted by Projection Teknik to map the entire cityscape in 3D to create the New York stories. While the centerpiece revolved around the iconic The Big Apple, it was, ironically, not displayed somewhere in New York.
It was displayed alongside with four other LEGO cities, namely London, Tokyo, Dubai and Sydney, at Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter 4 which concluded a couple of days ago.
Images: Ryan McNaught (Flickr).
