French history teacher Arnaud Gaudillat burst into tears as he recalled the 2019 television coverage of the burning Notre Dame cathedral. .
Now five years later, as hundreds of architects, engineers and metalworkers race to complete the rebuilding of the cathedral’s roof covering and cables by the end of the year, Mr Gaudilla will not stand idly by. He would build his own Notre Dame. One piece is made from 4,383 LEGO bricks.
Lego, the world’s largest toy company, released a model of Notre Dame on Saturday, including a rose window, bell tower and central spire surrounded by statues. Designed for adults, the set will be part of the company’s line of sets based on architectural feats, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“I just wanted to have this beautiful thing in my house,” Mr. Gaudilla, 25, said of the Notre Dame set. A few years ago, he started building complex Lego sets and became fascinated by them.
The Danish toy company is known for its colorful children’s playsets, including best-selling animal sets, train sets and Harry Potter-themed sets. But since 2020, when Lego launched a new toy category marketed to people ages 18 and older, the company has doubled the size of its product range for adults. About 20% of the company’s sets for sale are targeted at adult Lego fans, or AFOLs.
The Notre Dame set, which sells for $229.99, attracted attention for its design and the fact that it was the first religious structure released by the company in 67 years, according to official LEGO historians.
Paris-based writer and director Thomas Lajon said he wanted to buy a Lego Notre Dame because the real cathedral, a jewel of medieval Gothic architecture, was very important to him.
“This is a moment to reconnect with the cathedral by going to it or rebuilding it with Lego bricks,” said Mr. Lahon, 28, who designed the Orient through a corporate initiative that solicited design concepts from his fan base. Express car lego model.
Construction of the (real) Notre Dame Cathedral began in 1163 during the reign of King Louis VII and was completed in 1345. The cathedral fell into disrepair.
Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” highlighted the cathedral’s condition and inspired renovations between 1844 and 1864 .
Genevieve Capa Cruz, head of adult products at the LEGO Group, said in an interview that the company’s adult LEGO fan base has grown in recent years, especially among adults with stressful jobs who believe Building LEGO bricks is fun.
She said the company was trying to redefine Lego as a “legitimate leisure activity” for adults. “It’s like you invest time and money into making a ceramic bowl.”
She said themes that resonate with adults include architecture, flowers and movies such as “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars.” Adult Lego fans are important to the company, she said, not only because adult sets are more expensive (a Star Wars Millennium Falcon model costs $850) but because they also tend to buy Lego gifts for children.
Lego’s sales grew 4% last year, while other toy companies such as Mattel and Hasbro saw sales decline. CEO Niels B. Christiansen said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that against this background, Lego plans to open at least 100 more stores in the next 10 months.
Sonia Hudson, an intensive care doctor at a hospital outside London, said she plans to buy two Notre Dame Lego sets. She will make one to display in her living room and buy another to use as building blocks to add to her collection of about 500,000, which she uses to create her own designs.
“I don’t think of Lego as a toy,” said Dr. Hudson, 50, “I think of it as a building medium. I can build with wood, I can build with clay, but if I do it wrong, I You have to start over.
Rok Zgalin Kobe, the LEGO designer who created the Notre Dame set, said he designed the cathedral so that users would have to build it in the same stages as a real cathedral, rather than from the bottom up, tracing almost 900 years of history. history.
“Once you complete it, you can actually see it from the front door,” he said. “You get a sense of space and a sense of majesty that comes with it.”
The process of designing the set involved experimentation, requiring daily trips to a room at the company’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, which contained versions of all LEGO bricks that could be used to create new projects.
Like Dr. Hudson, who uses Legos to relax and unwind, 62-year-old Gordon Finlay is picking up Legos again after a long break. He and other Lego fans call the period between when people stopped playing with Lego bricks as children and rediscovered them as adults the “Dark Ages.”
Finlay, who lives outside Glasgow, said he plans to build a Lego version of Notre Dame next month, before 15 million visitors are expected to travel to Paris to watch the Olympics.
