Arnaud Gaudillat, a history teacher in France, recalled bursting into tears as he watched television coverage of the flames that destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019. “We couldn’t do anything but just watch it burn,” he said.
Now, five years later, as hundreds of architects, engineers and metal workers struggle to rebuild the cathedral’s roofing and electrical wiring by the end of the year, Mr. Gaudillat will not stand idly by. He will build his own Notre Dame. One made from 4,383 Lego bricks.
Lego, the world’s largest toy maker, released a model of Notre Dame Cathedral on Saturday, complete with rose windows, bell towers and a central tower surrounded by statues. Designed for adults, the set will be part of the company’s collection based on architectural masterpieces, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“I just want this beautiful thing in my house,” Mr. Gaudillat, 25, said of the Notre Dame set. A few years ago he started building complicated Lego sets and was hooked.
The Danish toy company is best known for its colorful playsets for children, including best-selling animal sets, train sets and Harry Potter-themed sets. But since Lego launched a new toy category aimed at people aged 18 and over in 2020, the company has doubled its adult range. About 20 percent of the company’s sets for sale are aimed at adult Lego fans, known as AFOLs.
The Notre Dame set, which sells for $229.99, is drawing attention for its design and because it is the first religious structure the company has released in 67 years, according to Lego’s official historian.
Thomas Lajon, a screenwriter and director in Paris, said he wanted to buy the Lego Notre Dame because the real cathedral, a jewel of medieval Gothic architecture, was so important to him.
“It’s a moment to reconnect with the cathedral by going there or rebuilding it with Lego bricks,” said Mr. Lajon, 28, who designed the Orient Express Lego model as part of a corporate program that incorporates design concepts from catches up fan bases.
Construction of the (real) Notre-Dame Cathedral began in 1163, during the reign of King Louis VII, and was completed in 1345. During the French Revolution in the 1790s, a mob beheaded statues of kings at Notre-Dame and the cathedral fell into disrepair.
Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame highlighted the condition of the cathedral and prompted its renovation, which took place from 1844 to 1864. The architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc designed and added a tower.
Genevieve Capa Cruz, head of adult product at Lego Group, said in an interview that the company’s base of adult Lego fans has grown in recent years, particularly among what she described as adults with high-pressure jobs that involve building of Legos as something she said was a way to relax.
The company is trying to make playing with Legos a “legitimate pastime” for adults, she said. “Just like you would invest time and money into making ceramic bowls.”
Topics that resonate with adults include architecture, flowers and films such as “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars,” she said. Adult Lego fans are important to the company not only because adult sets are more expensive – the Star Wars Millennium Falcon model costs $850 – but also because they tend to buy Lego gifts for children, too , she said.
Lego reported a 4 percent increase in sales last year, while other toymakers such as Mattel and Hasbro reported declines. With that in mind, Lego plans to open at least 100 more stores in the next 10 months, Chief Executive Officer Niels B. Christiansen said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Sonia Hudson, an intensive care doctor at a hospital outside London, said she planned to buy two of the Notre Dame Lego sets. She will build one to display in her living room and the other she will purchase for the bricks to add to her approximately 500,000-strong collection from which she creates her own designs.
“I don’t see Lego as a toy,” said Dr. Hudson, 50. “I see it as a building medium. I could build with wood, I could build with clay, but if I did something wrong I would have to start over.”
Rok Zgalin Kobe, the Lego designer who designed the Notre Dame set, said he designed the cathedral so that users would have to build it in the same phases that the real cathedral was built, rather than by bottom up, tracing almost 900 years of history.
“Once you finish it, you can actually see through the front door,” he said. “You get the feeling of the space, the feeling of majesty that comes with it.”
The set’s design process required experimentation and required daily visits to a room at the company’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, which contains versions of all the Lego bricks available for creating new projects.
Like Dr. Hudson, the doctor who uses Lego bricks to relax, has Gordon Finlay, 62, turning to Lego bricks again after not playing with them for a long time. He and other Lego fans refer to the period between stopping playing with Lego as a child and rediscovering it as an adult as “the Dark Ages.”
Mr Finlay, who lives outside Glasgow, said he planned to build Lego’s Notre-Dame next month, just before 15 million tourists are due to descend on Paris for the Olympics.
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2024-06-01 13:17:17
www.nytimes.com
