This could be the coolest job ever: You sit around all day playing with Legos; your supply of the little plastic bricks is endless; and you get paid a lot. Your job title: “Master Builder.”
WORKPLACE HEAVEN
Inside a 203-acre complex in Enfield, Connecticut, is one of the most unusual offices in the world: A singing Lego robot rolls across the floor. A Lego bald eagle plays a Lego banjo on a Lego shelf. Tiny green Lego gremlins peek out from under Lego plants. And lying around on the plush carpeting in the middle of it all is a dedicated team of Legomaniacs busily building their next masterpiece. Who are they? The Lego Master Builders.
STEPPING THE BRICK
Here are a few success stories for aspiring Legomaniacs.
• As a teenager in the 1980s, Francie Berger wrote the Lego company and asked if she could order two million standard red Lego bricks. They didn’t take her seriously at first, but after she built a working farm out of Legos they brought her on as a designer. She became the very first Master Builder.
• Bill Bodge built a model of Teddy Roosevelt and took it to his job interview. They told him to take it apart and create Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian singer/actress famous for wearing fruit on her head. He did it—and got the job.
First basketball player to appear on a box of Wheaties: Michael Jordan in 1988.
• Kurt Zimmerle spent an entire summer building an exact replica of the Biltmore mansion in North Carolina. He even built billiard tables with sticks and balls. Lego was impressed, but before they would hire him, they wanted to make sure he knew how to “step the brick” (Lego lingo for making round objects out of square pieces). So Kurt built a perfectly round Lego snowman. He was hired.
• “The goal,” says Master Builder Steve Gealing, “is to make creations look so real that people have to look twice and say ‘Was that really made of Legos?’”
LEGOLAND
What else have the Lego Master Builders built? Here are a few examples:
• Scale versions of New York City, Washington, D.C., and the California coastline—all down to the tiniest details, such as cable cars traversing the hilly streets of San Francisco.
• A 6-foot-tall surfing hippopotamus
• A 15-foot-tall replica of Albert Einstein’s head that welcomes guests to Lego Mindstorms, a workshop where you use computers to control Lego Technic models.
• A 3D replica of the Mona Lisa
• Life-size giraffes, zebras, lions, and elephants. (You can see them on the Safari Trek at Legoland in San Diego).
The Earth has an approximate mass of 12,976,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds.
• A 54-inch replica of the Aztec calendar.
Sound like something you’d like to do? Get in line. They get thousands of job requests a year. It’s hard to get in—but not impossible. You just have to be good. Really good. (If you can make round objects out of rectangular pieces, you’re well on your way.) But here’s the good news: you don’t need any special tools, just your hands, a great imagination…and lots of Legos.
LEGO LORE
• Lego was started in the 1930s by a poor Danish carpenter named Ole Kirk Kristiansen, who went door to door selling hand-carved wooden toys.
• “Lego” is a contraction of the Danish phrase leg godt, which means “play well.”
• Lego manufactures 400,000 2x4 bricks every day.
• Legos come in 84 colors—18 are translucent.
• The smallest Lego piece is the golden coin in the Knights’ Kingdom set.
• There are two Legoland theme parks: one in San Diego and one in Denmark. It took 30 million bricks to build the one in San Diego. And if you think that’s impressive: the Legoland in Denmark has more than 50 million bricks.
• It would take about 40 billion Lego bricks laid end to end to get to the moon.
Persians first began using colored eggs to celebrate spring in 3000 B.C.