The workshop
Who makes these
Made to build. Meant to keep.
Danny, in Providence, Rhode Island.
Every model on this site was designed here, on an engine built for this and nothing else — then checked against LEGO's own shop, priced from the real parts list, and proved to stand up, before anybody was shown it.
How a model is made
Every model starts as a grid — a voxel is a pixel with depth, and a house read off photographs is a lattice of coloured cells before it is anything else. Turning that into something a person can actually build is where the work is, and three things have to be true before a design leaves here.
Every piece is one LEGO sells
Not a piece that looks like it. We read all 4,180 shapes in LEGO's Pick a Brick shop and recorded a verdict for each: which we can place, which need a companion part, which attach by clip or pin and cannot be held, which belong to another system. Two hundred and ninety-four survived. Designs are built from those, in the colours LEGO actually makes them in, and checked against the shop while they are drawn.
Every brick is held
A model is walked brick by brick to find anything resting on nothing. Where a piece floats, a support goes in underneath — and the change is written down and told to you rather than quietly shipped. If a design cannot be made to stand, you hear that instead of a box of pieces that will not hold together.
The instructions come out of the model
Every step and every numbered bag is generated from the finished design: nineteen thousand bricks sorted into build order in about a second. Nobody draws a booklet by hand here, which is most of the reason a kit takes weeks rather than seasons.
What we will not do
We build with genuine LEGO® bricks, bought new from LEGO's own Pick a Brick shop. Not clone brands, and not second-hand lots of unknown provenance. If a piece cannot be bought new, it does not go into the design in the first place.
We do not start building until you have seen your model and said yes to it. And we do not show you a picture of something we could not actually make — every model in the gallery is a design that has been checked, priced and could be ordered this afternoon.
Where
Providence, Rhode Island.
Three of the models in the gallery are within half an hour of the workbench: the State House on its hill, Beavertail Light at the southern end of Conanicut Island, and the Towers over Ocean Road in Narragansett. They were built partly because they were there to look at, and partly because a building you have walked past a thousand times is the hardest thing to model. You know immediately when it is wrong.
If the place you want is in Rhode Island, say so — it is easier to get the details right when we can go and stand in front of it.