Children are wrestling with the jaws of a shark in mid-attack, while others are trying their hand at surfing on wobbly boards, raised up on a bright blue platform overlooking the endless forest that stretches around the small Danish town of Billund. Elsewhere, yet more crowds of kids are leaping across rubber steps, shrieking with delight as they race to the swings on this multi-levelled, multi-coloured landscape.

This gleaming ziggurat of fun is the new Lego House, a mind-blowing mecca for fans of the iconic construction toy, designed by BIG, the firm led by young Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. Now heading up a New York-based global empire, working on everything from Google’s new California campus to a Chinese energy firm’s HQ, Ingels sees the project as a homecoming.

“We have finally graduated as Danish architects,” he says proudly. “We have made a brick building – without breaking the brick module in a single place.” Ingels is referring to the rule, particularly observed by meticulous Danes, that you should never cut a brick to fit with your design, but configure the design to fit the brick instead.

Shark warning … the terraces have been turned into playgrounds. Photograph: Iwan Baan

For his first foray into bricks, Ingels couldn’t have landed a better commission – even if these are not actually bricks at all, but ceramic tiles clipped on to a steel frame. Rarely have architect and client been so well matched, given Ingels’ trademark brand of cartoonish quips, and his penchant for blocky forms. His buildings sometimes feel a little flat, more sheen than depth, but for a temple to Lego that couldn’t be more appropriate. The project is a triumph.

This staggered pile of shiny white blocks, built just metres from the redbrick house and workshop where the family-owned company began in 1932, is the ultimate embodiment of the Lego brand. At two of its corners, the big blocks appear to melt, plunging down to form cascading steps, encouraging you to clamber up on to the colourful terraces that spiral up to the summit for views across the town. A row of skylights, resembling the circular studs of Lego bricks, allow you to peer down into the building at the marvels within – chiefly a row of three huge dinosaurs howling with rage because, as keen observers will notice, they’ve each trodden on a piece of Lego.

“This had to be a place where even the most hardcore Lego fans would say, ‘Wow!’,” says Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, Lego CEO, who has been credited with turning the company around after it almost went bankrupt in 2004. “But it’s also about trying to revitalise the town centre, which has been left behind by all the development on the edge of the city, out near the airport. Visitors come to the Legoland and Lalandia theme parks, but they rarely venture into town.”

Gleaming white … the house at twilight. Photograph: Iwan Baan

As the employer of 4,500 of the 7,000 citizens of Billund, the company has an interest in the future of the place. It is fitting that the Lego House now stands on the site of the former town hall (which became redundant after municipal functions were recently consolidated), and Knudstorp says it is the centrepiece of a wider masterplan, on which BIG is also working, for Billund to become “the creative world capital of children”.

It can sometimes be tricky to separate the company from the town: it was Lego that built the airport in the 1960s and it recently founded its own international school here, based on “playful pedagogy”. It is now busy building housing for its employees, as well as a vast new HQ, similarly envisioned as a stack of toy blocks. In an eerie touch, Lego security cars also glide around town, as if waiting for some spectacular cartoon crime scene from The Lego Movie to erupt.

Guests have to save some woolly mammoths stuck in the Arctic ice – or make fish to be released into a digital aquarium

The opening of the Lego House comes at an awkward time for the brand. After years of untrammelled growth, the first half of 2017 saw revenue fall by 6%, leading to the announcement of 1,400 job losses earlier this month, 8% of the entire workforce. “We grew too quickly,” says Knudstorp, fiddling absentmindedly with a pile of bricks. “But I’m confident we’re back on track.”

In the world of the Lego House, though, everything is awesome. First, you’re taken on a journey through 13 galleries, cleverly designed to appeal to kids and grown-ups, with just the right mix of interactive tech and traditional brick-based fun. Like everything Lego, it’s not cheap, with tickets costing 199 krone, or £24, for adults and children alike.

Branching out … the Tree of Creativity rising through the stairwell. Photograph: Lego

You can try your hand at town-planning, Lego-style, with a digitised population of Lego mini-figures eagerly awaiting the arrival of housing, offices and green space, projected on to big model tables. The growing city adapts to whatever buildings visitors add, introducing young minds to such concepts as the logic of zoning.

Elsewhere, guests are challenged to save a population of woolly mammoths stuck in the Arctic ice, using a fleet of Lego Mindstorms robots, or invited to create a school of colourful fish to be released into a digital aquarium. There are recording booths for making your own stop-motion animation, and racing car components waiting for you to click a vehicle together and hurtle it down a ramp. All of these virtual wonders can be uploaded and enjoyed later on an accompanying app.

A robot smashes through an opera house and a streaker runs across a football pitch

But other zones are dedicated to what Lego has always done best: bricks. Mountains of them are everywhere, with buckets built into every bench and huge troughs filled by gushing brick waterfalls, along with galleries dedicated to impossibly detailed fantasy worlds full of amusing scenes, many submitted by Lego fans themselves.

“We thought, ‘If we gave a Lego superfan enough time and bricks, what would they make?’” says Stuart Harris, the man in charge of concocting these elaborate structures. The result is a robot smashing through the back of an opera house, U2 playing on the roof of an English pub, a streaker running across a football pitch, and many other surreal tableaux.

Jaw-dropping … the waterfall pouring through the wall. Photograph: LEGO

For serious AFOLs (adult fans of Lego), though, the sepulchral basement will be the highlight. Here, the Lego story is told with precious early prototypes from the archive spotlit in glass cases and arranged around a hallowed central shrine, where the most popular lines throughout the ages are on display, along with a digitised table of every Lego set ever made. Just in case it was all getting too grown-up, there’s a family of Lego moles, burrowing through the floor.

Museum cafes are seldom much to celebrate, but here again the brick brand has surpassed itself. “The mini-figures in the kitchen can’t understand us when we speak to them,” says an apologetic waitress, “so we have to give them your order in the form of Lego bricks.” Guests must then assemble their brick lunch, scan it in, then marvel as a Lego lunchbox trundles out of the kitchen, down a spiralling conveyor belt and into their hands, via a pair of humanoid robots. Visiting children were in raptures.

Lego lunch ⚙️🤖🍱💥 A post shared by Olly Wainwright (@ollywainwright) on Sep 27, 2017 at 7:03am PDT

Prehistoric pain … a dinosaur steps on a Lego brick. Photograph: Lego

In all of these jaw-dropping theatrics, the building fades into the background, a neutral setting of white volumes, gently tinted by the brightly coloured floors, always giving glimpses into other galleries. The designers have thankfully resisted the temptation to take the Lego theme too far – there are no oversized Lego doors, windows or light fittings. The simple Lego brick is the key: all of the furniture and exhibits are made from standard Lego pieces, enlarged to the same scale as the building, so you can go home and make a model of the entire thing yourself. Or buy the official version in the gift shop for £60.

Finally, as you leave, you pass a rumbling machine that spurts out packets of six red bricks, which each visitor is given, along with a combination card suggesting one way to put them together. “Considering six bricks can be configured in over 915 million ways,” says Harris, “it should keep us going for at least the next 3,000 years.”













