The Lego campus is made of glass, aluminium and stone

Denmark’s Lego Campus, based on an idea by C.F. Møller Architects, is made of aluminium, glass and stone, in a composition recalling the company’s famous plastic bricks.
Billund, Denmark is home to the Lego Campus, a building due to be completed in 2021 containing not only offices but a central area referred to as the People House containing a big auditorium, a fitness centre, an arts and crafts laboratory, a coffee shop and employee lodgings.
The building has a base made of hewn stone that makes it look as if made of millefeuille pastry, both fragile and solid, on top of which rises a volume of glass and steel. The big square windows of this volume, surrounded by overhanging steel frames in a different colour from the structure, reinforce the impression that the building itself is made of giant blocks of Lego. Here and there between the windows are bare concrete metopes perfectly reproducing classic Lego bricks, down to the logo impressed in the cylinders where they fit together, making the whole building look like a huge Lego construction. Lastly, atop these two volumes is an additional prism containing offices, covered with yellow aluminium, once again iconically reproducing the Danish brand’s distinctive signs.
But we should not be fooled by the building’s playful appearance: the parking tower is covered with 4150 solar panels generating 1 million kWh/year, half of the building’s energy requirements. Inside, the architects chose a special gypsum fibre board material for the internal walls because it requires less steel framing, saving 22 tons of steel and 650 tons CO2 emissions.


Fabrizio Orsini

Photo Adam Mørk