French history teacher Arnaud Gaudier recalled being moved to tears as he watched television coverage of flames ravaging Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019. “All we could do was watch it burn,” he said.
Five years later, as hundreds of architects, engineers and metalworkers race to finish re-roofing the cathedral and re-wiring it by the end of the year, Gaudiya isn’t going to sit idly by: He’ll be building his own Notre Dame. 4,383 LEGO pieces.
Lego, the world’s largest toy maker, on Saturday launched a model of Notre Dame Cathedral, complete with a rose window, a bell tower and a central spire surrounded by statues. Designed for adults, the set is part of the company’s collection of sets based on architectural feats such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Notre Dame. Falling Water and his Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“I just want to have this beautiful thing in my house,” Ghodiya, 25, said of the Notre Dame set. He started building the elaborate Lego sets several years ago and became hooked.
Danish toy maker Lego is best known for its colorful playsets for kids, including animal sets, train sets and Harry Potter-themed sets. But since 2020, when Lego launched a new toy category aimed at ages 18 and up, the company has doubled its product lineup targeted at adults. About 20% of the sets it sells are aimed at adult fans of Lego, known as AFOLs.
The Notre Dame set, priced at $229.99, is attracting attention for its design and as the first religious building the company has released in 67 years, according to Lego’s official historian.
Paris-based writer and director Thomas Rajon said he wanted to buy a Lego version of Notre-Dame because of how important the real cathedral, a jewel of medieval Gothic architecture, is to him.
“It’s a moment to reconnect with the cathedral by visiting it and reconstructing it with Lego bricks,” said Rajon, 28, who designed the Lego model of the Orient Express through an in-house program that solicited design concepts from fans.
Construction of Notre Dame Cathedral (the real one) began in 1163 during the reign of King Louis VII and was completed in 1345. During the French Revolution in the 1790s, a mob decapitated the statue of the king at Notre Dame and the cathedral fell into a state of disrepair.
Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, highlighted the cathedral’s current state and was the impetus for its renovation, which took place between 1844 and 1864. Architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc designed and added a spire.
Genevieve Capa-Cruz, the Lego Group’s head of adult products, said in an interview that the company’s adult Lego fan base has grown in recent years, especially among adults in high-pressure jobs who see building with Lego as a way to unwind.
The company is trying to redefine playing with Lego as a “legitimate leisure activity” for adults, she said, “just like spending time and money building a ceramic bowl.”
Themes that resonate with adults include architecture, flowers and movies like “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars,” she said. Adult Lego fans aren’t just there because the adult sets are more expensive, but the Star Wars Millennium Falcon is also important to the company. Model price is $850 — but they also tend to buy their kids Lego gifts, she said.
Lego reported a 4% sales increase last year, even as other toy makers such as Mattel and Hasbro suffered sales declines. Against this backdrop, Lego plans to open at least 100 more stores over the next 10 months, Chief Executive Niels B. Christiansen said. Interview with Yahoo Finance.
Sonia Hudson, an intensive care doctor at a hospital outside London, said she plans to buy two Notre Dame Lego sets: one to decorate her living room and the other for the bricks to add to a collection of about 500,000 that she will use to build her own designs.
“I don’t see Lego as a toy,” says Dr Hudson, 50. “I see it as a building medium. You can build it with wood, you can build it with clay, but if you make a mistake you have to start over.”
Lego designer Roque Zgalin-Kobe, who created the Notre Dame set, said he designed it so that users could build it in the same stages that the actual cathedral was constructed, rather than from the bottom up, tracing nearly 900 years of history.
“When it’s finished, you’ll actually be able to look in through the front door,” he says, “and get a sense of the spaciousness and grandeur that comes with it.”
The set design process involved experimentation, requiring daily trips to a room within the company’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, to see all the versions of LEGO bricks that could be used to create new projects.
Like Dr. Hudson, the doctor who relaxes with Lego, Gordon Finlay, 62, also picked up Lego after a long absence. He and other Lego fans call the period between when they stopped playing with Lego as children and when they rediscovered it as adults “the dark ages.”
Mr Finlay, who lives outside Glasgow, said he plans to build the Lego Notre Dame next month, just before 15 million tourists are expected to descend on Paris for the Olympics.
