The LEGO House In Billund, Denmark might just be the only museum in the world where you’re encouraged to touch all the artifacts. The structure, an architectural portrait of LEGO in the form of a building, was created by the multidisciplinary Danish firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group.
More an experience center than a conventional museum, LEGO House is designed to be as inviting and engaging and inclusive as LEGO itself. The nearly 12,000-square-meter (128,737-sq.-ft.) structure is a stack of twenty-one oversized ‘bricks’ rising like a pixelated mountain of color, welcoming locals and visitors alike to inhabit the building through play.
LEGO House is one of 55 recent projects featured in our new book BIG Atlas. For over two decades, BIG has created a wide range of projects that give form to the future, standing out for their bold-yet-practical forms, elements of surprise, and people-focused solutions. BIG Atlas offers an ambitious and all-encompassing survey of more than fifty completed projects from around the world, spanning a rich variety of typologies, scales, materials, and clients, the most significant of which include Audemars Piguet, Google, Noma, and San Pellegrino.
Spanning a rich variety of typologies, scales, and materials, the featured projects in the book are brought to life through more than 600 photographs, plans, and drawings. Presented together for the first time, they trace BIG’s transformation into fully integrated design, synthesizing the fields of architecture, interiors, landscape, engineering, planning, and product design to advance more sustainable ways of living within our environments while simultaneously raising the quality of our lives.
BIG Atlas opens with a foreword by architect Kent Martinussen, followed by an introduction by Joseph Grima, and also includes an essay by Andri Snær Magnason on BIG’s impact on the built landscape of Copenhagen. It was edited and designed by Valentina Ciuffo and Joseph Grima the duo behind the design platform Alcova, dedicated to showcasing cutting-edge projects in contemporary design, architecture, and technology.
The thinking behind the LEGO House is just one example of the groundbreaking work of this visionary firm, as the text in the book explains.
“Every level is color-coded in shades familiar to anyone who’s ever opened a LEGO set: red for creativity, green for social interaction, blue for cognitive skill, and yellow for emotion. The exterior shell of the building is an unassuming white, creating a striking contrast with the brightly colored rooftops of each brick.”
“Viewed from above, the structure becomes a patchwork of color, evoking a rainbow of LEGO blocks and forming terraces and outdoor play spaces. Inside, the building unfolds like a labyrinth, with workshops, galleries, play zones, and terraces.”
“At the heart of the LEGO House is the Tree of Creativity, a towering sculpture made of more than six million bricks. Meanwhile, the Masterpiece Gallery, located on the very top level, displays some of the most intricate LEGO constructions imaginable, from lifelike animals to abstract works of art, created by LEGO fans from around the world.”
“The circulation inside is fluid, with pathways that wind up, down, and across different levels, forming “a cloud of interlocking bricks” and creating a sense of continuous exploration. The LEGO House is an architectural embodiment of the brand’s philosophy of learning through play—a system where creativity finds its flow within a structured framework. Just as every LEGO set comes with embedded “rules” that offer both guidance and limitations, the LEGO House provides an environment where imagination thrives within the structure, where each visitor can build, unbuild, and reimagine. The building’s design reinforces this approach, reminding us that creativity is often at its most powerful when it operates within a framework—whether that framework is a LEGO brick, a ratio, a floor plan, or the open spaces in-between.”
For more cutting edge architecture, take a closer look at BIG Atlas.
