Nine Years and 35,000 Legos Later

When we asked for a Marriott School of Management faculty member with unusual hobbies, the ROTC sent us straight to recruiting and operations officer Dave Jungheim. As it turns out, building the Salt Lake Temple out of more than thirty-five thousand Lego bricks can get you noticed.

While that’s what Jungheim did, it wasn’t for attention as much as it was a pursuit of creativity—and to please his wife. Jungheim, like many, rekindled his childhood love of Legos as an adult. While in flight school in 2002, his pieces were all gears and pneumatics for engineering robots. Then his wife, Catherine, suggested he try something different and build the Salt Lake Temple. Knowing the scale and the cost of such a project, his initial reaction was disbelieving: “This is not something we’re ever going to build.” After Catherine persisted, Jungheim scrapped together a fifth of one tower over a Labor Day weekend to prove the task impossible. Knowing it could cost thousands of dollars, she took one look at the yellow-brick hodgepodge and asked when he could start.

Thus began a nine-year quest of planning, tracking down pieces, building, and rebuilding. Jungheim endured the pressure of flight school by spending Sunday meetings scribbling schematics on graph paper—a process of prototyping that alone consumed about two years. It was the last top spire that proved the most time consuming. “Eventually I had to get out a scroll saw and cut it at those angles. It finishes it off, so it has to look good,” Jungheim says of the only custom Lego pieces on the temple. “Otherwise there’s no way. I tried every possible Lego piece! It took me two years to figure that one out.”

The completed temple stands six feet tall in its maple wood case, which was all hand-crafted by Jungheim. “I took woodworking in high school, because they didn’t have Lego-making,” he jokes. The surroundings of the temple include all the trimmings as well as a few surprises, like a garden gnome in the flower bed. Standing in for Angel Moroni is a gold-painted Obi- Wan Kenobi. You may spot a Princess Leia headed to the temple, but Jungheim assured us this woman is simply German.

In fact, Jungheim credits his own German heritage for his love of Legos. At age nine, he emigrated from Germany, where Legos are even more popular than in the States. He returned to Germany for his mission and holds a BA in German from BYU. Besides building Lego robots and temples, he’s created a model train—a tribute to Europe’s railways—that sits in his office on campus.

Despite spending hours with blocks, Jungheim is a fierce, fourth-generation military man, with twenty-one years of service in the National Guard, including a year-deployment to Afghanistan. At BYU he’s overseen a range of ROTC programs, most recently managing the physical fitness program and teaching the freshman fundamentals class. Once a week, he’s off campus flying Apache helicopters with the Guard. He completed his MBA through the Marriott School in 2013.

Occasionally he gets a good-natured ribbing from his colleagues about his hobbies: one interrupted our interview with a chorus of The Lego Movie’s, “Everything is Awesome!,” and another confessed to cow-tipping along the model train tracks. It’s all compliments beneath the teasing though. As one associate remarked, “Jungheim could build a nuclear weapon out of a Dixie cup and string.” We imagine he’d throw in a few Legos too.

“This is my first attempt at model railroading,” Jungheim says. “I just wanted to see if I could do it. It’s all Styrofoam and plaster, and these rocks are from Rock Canyon and Slate Canyon. I grew up riding the rails in Europe and enjoyed watching trains, so this is something that I built. It’s a very big hobby in Germany as well. The kids and the cat kept destroying it, though, so I brought it to the office.” The inside of the temple is hollow, leaving room for LED lights that make the temple tiers glow just like the real thing. “We’ve had people over here who’ve seen it and started crying, saying, ‘It’s so beautiful,’” says Jungheim. “It’s not something that I would have done normally. It’s my opus.” “My kids enjoy playing with the Lego characters and making them do stuff, like sharks eating people,” Jungheim says. “They do adventures together. Me, I tend to find myself in the corner building some crazy contraption that’s remote controlled.” When it comes to Lego robots, like this bug, Jungheim does his own code programming. Though they’re twice the scale of the temple, Jungheim used genuine mini-figs for the wedding entourage outside the temple. There are even a few familiar faces from the Harry Potter collection. The inscription was originally going to be made directly on the Legos. When a local trophy shop started the engraving though, they quickly discovered that the melting point of Legos was too low. They instead used a normal piece of plastic, and Jungheim painted in the gold lettering with a toothpick. “While I was on a deployment, Lego announced that they were discontinuing the shade of grey I had been using. I ended up forking out $2,500 to get the pieces I needed for completing it,” Jungheim says. Two weeks before leaving to Afghanistan, packages of pieces showed up on his doorstep from sellers around the world. It wasn’t until his mid-tour leave that he had three days to finally open them up and dig into building for twelve to eighteen hours a day.

35,000 Legos in the News

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