Enabling Environments: Architecture - Lego land

From the outside, Cowley St Laurence Children's Centre is not your average setting. Clad in more than a million Lego pieces, the centre in Uxbridge, London, is the world's first inhabited structure made of the toy bricks.

The aim of the £900,000 project was to involve children from start to finish in the design and construction. Architects and modellers from WHAT Architecture and Legoland Windsor worked with nursery and primary children to help bring their designs to life using 1,263,801 Lego bricks to clad the children's centre.Children were invited to submit designs to be used on the facade at special workshops run by centre staff.

Centre manager Karen Western says, 'When the architect approached us about building the centre from Lego, I thought it was a great idea and the perfect way to get everyone in the community involved.

'We wanted every child to have the opportunity to take part in the design. Initially we thought of giving children a take-home pack, but in the end we decided on running workshops during term time.'

Workshops were organised according to the children's age and abilities. Pre-school children were given Lego bricks to create their 3-D designs, while older pupils drew pictograms on to paper.

Staff also had the opportunity to create their own designs in teacher workshops. 'However, they were less confident than the children and more worried that their design wouldn't be good enough', says Ms Western.

WORLDWIDE ATTENTION

To transfer the designs - which features the children's pictograms, hieroglyphs and religious and computer images - on to the facade, modellers and architects produced templates of them and built upon them. A team of parents, children and local community volunteers took two weeks to help build the 250 sq m Lego facade brick by brick.

The child-friendly design also includes a Noah's Ark themed wall containing Lego animals, people, insects and an ark, as well as a side of the neighbouring school with the core values spelled out in the toy bricks.

The children's centre, the 11th in the London Borough of Hillingdon, shares the same site as Cowley St Laurence C of E Primary School. Since it opened last summer, the centre has attracted worldwide attention from the architectural profession, says Ms Western.

'The children were really excited to see their Lego designs on the children's centre,' she says. 'They all loved taking part in the project and going through the whole process.

'I have a fantastic view of the Lego from my office and every time I look at it, I notice something different. I hope that the centre is as inspiring inside as it is out.'

The design of the centre was also featured in the Royal Academy's summer exhibition 2010. Now it is awaiting a decision from Guinness World Records for having the largest quantity of interlocking plastic bricks.