The city so nice, they built it twice — the second time using Legos.
An Irish teen who’s an aspiring architect has gone viral for freestyle-building a realistic miniature version of Manhattan using only tiny toy building blocks.
“He is an amazing, gifted, compassionate child who just wants to be an architect, build Lego and live happily in NYC,” mother Laura Bailey told Caters news service of her 14-year-old son, Alex, who built the 6-foot-long and immediately recognizable re-creation of the greatest city on Earth in his Dublin living room.
An aerial video Bailey took of Alex’s completed Lego Big Apple has racked up over 2.4 million views since she posted it to Twitter, with New Yorkers taking to the comments to applaud his attention to detail and accuracy.
Not only does Alex’s take of the borough include landmarks such as the Empire State Building and Central Park, but it also includes the area’s banal yet distinguishable office buildings.
Alex’s architectural toy skills have been long in the making, Bailey said.
“Alex has wanted to be an architect and also a Lego builder since he was 4 years of age and has never changed his mind on that,” she said. Expressing himself artistically by building with the toys has become a form of escapism for the boy, who has ADHD and has long struggled “with school and being bullied when he was younger.”
While Bailey says Alex “has always been fascinated with New York and dreams of moving there when he is older,” his Lego-ized Manhattan was inspired by the family’s visit to New York last winter.
“We surprised him and his brother with a trip last Christmas to NYC, and we did the doors-off helicopter ride. It was this that gave him the idea to do a 6-foot freestyle build from Lego,” she said.
Legos have proved an artistic and distracting outlet for many families during the ongoing pandemic, evidenced by a sales spike in the first half of the year for the Danish company, which this Friday is set to release its largest-ever Lego set.
