From The Archives: My LEGO Pyramid

Somewhere in my teens, I grew bored with LEGOs. I briefly explored abstract creations with the specialized pieces of Technic and Classic Space, and created octahedrons using the classic bricks.

Eventually, I used a 50x50 base plate, and constructed a pyramid with bricks. Using almost every brick I had, I corbelled each brick so that half of each brick was attached to the one below, creating a stair-step angle. I had to calculate which row would have which color to maximize the use of bricks. I only used one cheat: a blue layer needed a brick, and I had to laminate slats to create the needed brick. I soon discovered that each side tended to buckle towards the middle of each side, which necessitated the use of braces along the bottom half of the pyramid.

Since this was a pyramid, I felt that the interior should have some sort of ritualistic purpose, and designed a complex structure inside. However, all that remains of this are some schematics drawn on graph paper. LEGO does offer a digital construction program on their website, and I might reconstruct this digitally.

Once completed, I stored it away in a cabinet with the remains of my other LEGOs. Roughly eight years later, I dusted it off, and wrote a paper for an architectural history class, investigating the use of LEGOs and corbelling techniques. I passed the class... and the original paper awaits rediscovery via Macintosh System 9.

What follows are pictures taken with my Treo cellphone, as I deconstructed the pyramid. Almost very brick is classic, although some were from Classic Space sets.

From the Archives: LEGO "Wir Bauen" Idea Book

Yesterday morning, the grandkids (my nieces and nephew) came over to play.

Being the cool uncle that I am, I excavated my box of LEGO bricks from the basement.

When I was younger, I was a LEGO fanatic, having inherited the toys my three older brothers had outgrown. Every Christmas, I would get one big set (or some smaller ones). For those box-shakers out there, rattling LEGOS have a sound unlike any other! Sure, you know there are LEGOs inside, but what kind? And what are you going to build?

My friends were Space Lego fans (Star Wars influence, circa 1980), so most of my sets are from the early years of that series. (Alpha-1 Rocket Base, Starfleet Voyager (suh-weet)...)

I have lots of the older, traditional bricks (now known as Creator), and used them to build a massive pyramid on a 50x50 base plate. That was my swan song as a child, although I did use that model as the basis of a paper on corbelling for an architectural history class at university.

So, while I was digging around the boxes, I found some older manuals. The following pictures are from a magazine-sized book which was old when I first saw it. I have no idea what the original looks like, but as a kid it was both fascinating to look at and frustrating to contemplate. Here were little dioramas, little Legoland displays I could make, but the pieces were too exotic! (Clear bricks, those rare quarter-column curved pieces, flags!)

The text is German. "Wir bauen" translates to "We build". I love the illustration style, somewhere between photo and illustration. Note that brick edges have been highlighted to help builders decipher brick placement. This document is from the early 1960s, as LEGO entered that market in 1959. Possibly 1964, when instruction manuals were first produced. The staples were lost years ago, so I have arranged the pages thematically.

Enjoy!