American Family Insurance national headquarters created in LEGOs? Yep.
By Ryan Hummer, American Family Insurance Security Operations Analyst
I’ve collected LEGO™ architecture sets for a while and displayed them on my desk at work. I thought it would be fun to build my own model instead of using a pre-made set.
Because whatever I built would be on my desk, I thought it would be cool to make a structure that folks who work at American Family Insurance would get a kick out of. First, I was going to build our “B” building to a much larger scale. When I realized how much that would cost — literally more than $1,000 — I decided to do all of our National Headquarters, but on a much smaller scale.
The piece is 15-inches square, contains approximately 1,500 pieces and took one month to plan and another to build.
The planning was the most challenging, because I had to account for elevation gain. Level 1 is the same for all buildings, but it’s on ground level near my company’s “A” building, it’s underground near the “B” parking ramp entrance, and it’s two stories up near the pond-side grill.
I had to design the landscape to slope upward at scale. I spent lots of time taking pictures of certain areas that were going to be a challenge. Google Maps helped make sure I got the sizing of everything correct from an aerial view — at least as close as is possible with LEGOs™ — but getting the right heights was challenging.
I bought the pieces as I went along, I started with a gray baseplate and tan pieces to get the dimensions and placement correct. Then I built from there.
I redid many parts, such as the roofs and the water. I originally had bumpy blue pieces for the water, but it didn’t really look like water, so I had to go find flat blue pieces.
For now it’s a cool desk decoration. I’ve had folks say I should make a set with instructions. I could totally do that, but it would probably cost more than $500 and I’m not sure there’s enough demand.
Perhaps I’ll build a piece depicting our “A” and “B” parking ramps and the condos across the street. That could be a fun follow-up project.
