Meet Barnaby Gunning

Barnaby Gunning, principal at Barnaby Gunning Architects, designed the LEGO house built for James May’s Toy Stories television show, where each episode is focused on the creation of ambitious projects using classic toys. Gunning used modo to design the house built out of more than three million standard-sized LEGO bricks.

Please tell us about the LEGO House...

The LEGO House was a full-sized house built in the summer of 2009 using approximately 3.5 million regular LEGO bricks as part of James May’s Toy Stories, a television series produced by Plum Pictures for the BBC. In the series James May, one the three presenters of the BBC’s phenomenally successful Top Gear programme, set out to undertake ludicrously ambitious projects using classic toys. The series included the construction of a full-size Spitfire model, a garden built of plasticene, bridging a canal using only Meccano, recreating and racing on a full sized motor racing circuit in Scalextric and reinstating the 10 mile railway line between two towns using Hornby 00 gauge tracks. The two story LEGO house is the subject of the finale to the series and was broadcast on BBC2 over the 2009 Christmas holiday.

That is a huge endeavor to physically construct such a thing. How did you approach it?

Our idea for the house was that the overall building should be made by combining thousands of smaller “houses”, some with windows, some as roof pyramids and many simply acting as hollow blocks.

Initial components were fabricated on a “mass build” day when over 2000 members of the public braved the torrential rain of a typical English summer day to assemble standard components. Then, over a period of about six weeks, a team of volunteers worked with a small building team to fabricate the remaining components and assemble them into the complete building.

Well you make it sound easy. How did you create the doors?

Overlapping lego bricks were used to create a piano hinge system for hinging the doors. The doors were built course by course in parallel with the walls.

Is LEGO strong enough to use for a real house?

One of the aims of the project was to see if LEGO could be used as a proper building material. Working with Neil Thomas and Eva Wates of structural engineers Atelier One, we designed a constructional system of hollow blocks and joists that played to the compressive strength of LEGO bricks and to the surprising tensile strength of LEGO plates. Despite intensive testing it was not possible to get insurance coverage for the production company so we suggested using a parallel timber structure that could be sleeved by our hollow construction blocks.

Tell us about what appears to be a stained glass window...

The British public donated a large number of bricks many of which were too small to easily use in the wall components and which were translucent or fully see through. All the 2x1 lego bricks were put in a bucket, shaken up and then used at random to create translucent blocks that were then laid together to make a stunning stained glass window at the end of the staircase.

What about the details in the interior?

The interior designer, Christina Fallah, was commisioned to design a series of striking patterned furniture pieces and a variety of accessories and accoutrements for the house. She also came up with a very beautiful “random” block pattern for the internal wall between the kitchen and living area.

What became of the house??

The LEGO house was used by James May for a single night in September, and despite a huge public outcry and a determined Facebook campaign to save it, it was dramatically demolished a few days later and the LEGO put back in the box.

Why did you decide to use modo for this project?

I have always used 3D modeling as a key part of my design process — I tend to move back and forward between hand drawing, 3D modeling and drawing production. modo is my primary 3D modeling environment and I often use it as a presentation tool, moving around the model quickly to give clients a feel for the three dimensional space that we are proposing for them.

I was approached by Plum Pictures, the production company for the entire series, after they had already ordered the LEGO for the house but before that had actually received any of it. So that I could get moving on the design as quickly as possible I made a quick virtual LEGO set in modo and used this to build models of basic components that could be made up using several hundred LEGO pieces each. modo made it easy for me to explain how these should be made so that we could get prototype components made for testing and so that we could get the general public to make them in their thousands.

I also made a series of simplified component models in modo that were textured up to resemble the completed components and then combined these to make the overall building design.

Could you please describe the most challenging/spectacular/cutting-edge modeling and/or rendering tasks that were accomplished using modo?

Effectively there were two parallel sets of information created in modo: the detailed models used to explain how to make the components and a textured model of the whole house used to explore the layout and the overall design. Both required being able to quickly duplicate instances of geometry. We wrote a number of Python scripts which we used to accomplish much of this quickly.

Did modo help you save time, money, or both?

modo gave us a feel for the material quality of LEGO as a large scale building material way before we were actually able to put any of the components together. It made it easy for us to explain what we needed doing and to keep tabs on the number of bricks being used in the building.

What are your favorite features in modo and/or which tools have you found most useful in your projects?

The ease of scripting modo is a major benefit. Creating instructions for building the roof pyramids could have been very time consuming – instead we were able to write a simple script that created the roof pyramids quickly from our virtual LEGO set.

Was there anything about using modo in this project that surprised you?

I hadn’t anticipated how reflective LEGO bricks are when put together en-masse. When making my initial models I noticed that the bricks are fairly glossy and so I set up the material properties to allow for this. When producing the first rendered images I was surprised by how strong the reflections were. It led us to decide on a striking striped pattern to the external walls and strong graphic motifs for the internal walls. When the building started coming together it was remarkably similar to the original visuals.

What other hardware/software did you use in your pipeline?

Thank you Barnaby!