Architectural adventures in Lego

To us Lego is a plaything, but to Icelandic-Danish architecture practice Krads it is a tool for ‘parametric exploration.’

Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week
Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week

Krads is working with think tank and research institute The Why Factory and Lego, which has donated 200,000 of its little bricks for a series of architectural investigations.

Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week
Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week

The venue is former home of Nokia, The Cable Factory, in Helsinki, Finland, an impossibly large brick building and reminder of the capital’s industrial past.

Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week
The Cable Factory

It’s now a thriving cultural hub, home for various creative companies, and one of the places I took in on a trip to Helsinki, which is World Design Capital for 2012. 

From 11-16 September, Helsinki celebrates its Design Week. This is when the factory will be ‘transformed into an expansive Lego construction site and a forum for playful co-creation,’ according to Krads.

Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week
Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week

 The Aalto University and Icelandic Design Centre are involved and there’s a public programme of talks and lectures billed alongside the Lego experiments, so if you can get out there, you should go.

Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week
The relationship between mass and void

It’s not all play though.  A recent tie-up between The Why Factory and Lego saw 100,000 Lego bricks used to form 676 towers built on a scale of 1:1000, and 16 towers built on a scale of 1:100, in an investigation to look at possible new relationships between mass and void in large scale architecture.   

Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week
Krads, The Why Factory, and Lego will be at Hesinki Design Week

Krads, The Why Factory and LEGO at Helsinki Design Week takes place during Helsinki Design Week from 11-16 September 2012, at The Cable Factory, Tallbergsgatan, 1  00180 Helsinki

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