Lego Wants You to Unleash Your Inner Modernist

Lego released a new kit this month with no instructions, almost entirely white bricks, and the hopes that you’ll turn the blocks into mini-modernist experiments.

The Lego Architecture Studio, currently available in the US, has the tagline “create your own architecture” accompanying its 1,210 white and clear pieces. But of real interest is the hefty 277-page book that’s included and may not tell you exactly what to build, but has different exercises in architectural ideas, as well as insight into real-life building from architecture studios.

As it says in its book: “From the time the very first two Lego bricks were put together over 60 years ago, kids all over the world have been building houses, fire stations, and imaginary buildings with wings and wheels.” And as anyone who had Legos as a kid knows, the real fun after you’ve built the castle or spaceship or pirate ship or whatever is then merging those into something like a four-foot-tall robot filled with treasure or a rickety treetop city (to name a couple of my own childhood examples). Yet you’re likely to end up more Mies van der Rohe than medieval-robot here.

Though the site carries this correction for the book: “After the Lego Studio book was printed, an editorial mistake was found. […] The text should have named Frank Lloyd Wright as the architect of the Guggenehim instead of Mies Van der Rohe.”

Oops. Well, the kit follows Lego’s growing line of adult-oriented mini-architecture, with buildings like Fallingwater, Burj Khalifa, and yes, even the not-by-Mies-Van-der-Rohe Guggenheim. But could you do better than them all? Probably not, building blocks and concepts only go so far, but at least here with this kit you have a small start.

Lego Architecture Studio is available from Lego for $149.99. Third party vendors on Amazon are charging about $40 more, for some reason.