Let My People LEGO: The National Cathedral Rebuilds With 400,000 LEGOs

• March 1st 2019

by Nena Perry-Brown

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Nearly eight years after an earthquake rattled the DC area, the Washington National Cathedral is still rebuilding. Now, as part of its ongoing fundraising efforts, you can help the Cathedral be rebuilt, albeit on a much smaller scale. 

Today, the Cathedral launched "Let There Be LEGO", an endeavor to build a to-scale model of the iconic edifice out of 400,000 LEGO blocks. Members of the public can purchase a block for $2 each and add it to the model. All proceeds will go toward ongoing earthquake-related repairs to the real Cathedral.

“The Cathedral is thrilled to offer a new way for visitors and worshippers to engage the building, and to relive the process of building a grand cathedral from the ground up,” Charles Fulcher, the Cathedral’s director of visitor programs, said in a statement.

The design schematic for the model was furnished by Bright Bricks, a UK-based LEGO-certified building company. The process of creating the model for the National Cathedral began last summer, and Bright Bricks co-director Ed Diment and his team used architectural plans and photos they took of the edifice to create a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) model. That model was then used to create a series of modules of the building that were input into LEGO CAD software in order to break down how each individual piece of the structure would be recreated with LEGO blocks.

The scale of the LEGO version is roughly 1/40th of the actual cathedral. At completion, the model will be 7 feet tall and 13 feet long, roughly the size of a minivan. Bright Bricks has done similar fundraising endeavors with other cathedrals in Europe, starting with the Durham Cathedral in 2013, which was comprised of over 300,000 Legos and took three years to assemble.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/let-my-people-lego-the-national-cathedral-rebuilds-again-in-miniature/15066.