Back in September, I gave a presentation at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle, Washington. The talk was on the last Friday before the Towers of Tomorrow with LEGO Bricks exhibit (designed by Ryan McNaught and his team) closed and moved on to a different city. I was excited to give people in the Seattle area an opportunity to learn more about LEGO and Architecture while seeing the exhibit. As you will learn in a moment, I also created a scavenger hunt to make it even more fun!

Presentation

The focus of the presentation was to explore 8 common architectural styles using both photos of real buildings and photos of amazing LEGO Models based on each style. In addition to the 7 styles featured in my book The LEGO Architect, I added a section about Gothic architecture, and a section exploring emerging trends in contemporary architecture.

You can watch the whole presentation on YouTube. (Please 👍, Subscribe, and leave a comment!)

Since my talk was almost exactly 9 years to the day from when I released my book, I’ve had some time to reflect on the broader narrative of how and why architectural styles change over time.

That’s why I’ve changed how each style is introduced to explain why the style developed in the first place, such as the introduction of new technology like Curtain Wall construction that made Modernism possible, or the desire to create more environmentally sustainable architecture that is driving current trends in Architecture.

The Builder’s Guide explores how to leverage Color, Scale, and Detail to create LEGO Architecture models.

This was followed by a LEGO Architecture Builders Guide — which offered some tips to get started building LEGO Architecture models of your own. When you watch the video, you will also find that I start with a brief introduction about me and my own journey as a LEGO builder, author, and blogger.

Scavenger Hunt

For people who attended the presentation live, I created something extra — a Scavenger Hunt! In addition to attending my talk, guests had an hour to explore the exhibit Towers of Tomorrow with LEGO Bricks before the presentation.

To make this more fun for guests, I created a challenging but achievable scavenger hunt where guests needed to find 15 specific LEGO parts which are hidden somewhere on the models in the display. In order to make this happen, I came to the MOHAI about a week before my talk and looked closely at all of the models to find Nice Part Usage (NPU) which would be fun for people to find in the scavenger hunt.

The Scavenger Hunt invited guests to find 15 parts hidden in the exhibition.

After I completed my talk, I created slides showing guests at least ome place where each part was hidden in the exhibit. I wasn’t quite sure how people would respond to the scavenger hunt idea, but it was very well received! MOHAI staff made it even more fun by doing a raffle for everyone who participated and gave out some great prizes!

I included photos showing where each part could be found in the exhibit.

I did not include the scavenger hunt in the video recording because it wouldn’t be interesting to a wider audience, but wanted to share this part of the experience with readers because it was a lot of fun.