You’re looking on the future middle of the brick cosmos: the brand new Lego Innovation Campus. Proper now, the individuals who create your favourite revolutionary brick merchandise are scattered in numerous buildings across the firm’s hometown of Billund, Denmark. However in 2027, they’ll collect at Lego’s new campus, in six color-coded buildings made from sustainable timber.
In accordance with Julia Goldin, Chief Product & Advertising Officer on the Lego Group, “the brand new Innovation Campus in Billund shall be our world inventive middle for product and design excellence. It’s the place each new Lego expertise will come to life.” The design of the brand new campus is itself an embodiment of the modular spirit of Lego system—every bit connecting seamlessly into a bigger world.
Its planning displays this philosophy, which is seen in its key architectural elements just like the PlayWay, a central corridor connecting the entire campus’ buildings. There are additionally sprawling atriums in patios illuminated by pure gentle via skylights that may open with good climate, and the open areas that Lego calls loops, the place folks can meet spontaneously. Every part is interconnected as a option to, in principle, encourage cross-pollination of concepts among the many groups. All these parts within the Lego Innovation Campus act as connective hubs, Lego says, facilitating an open dialogue between completely different features and permitting completely different groups to construct off one another’s power and experience.
The PlayWay is a central corridor that connects all of the campus’ buildings and its parts. It additionally accommodates areas designed to encourage staff to have fun impromptu collaborations in the same approach that completely different children connect with play within the Lego Home, the corporate’s interactive museum nicknamed the “house of the brick.”
The brand new campus appears to share the identical philosophy that drove the Lego House‘s design, which has the same division of color-coded areas interconnected to a central open atrium, that includes a huge Tree of Creativity made from bricks that grows every year. Within the Lego Home, every of these areas is devoted to the core competencies set within the “Studying via play” philosophy, a set of schooling beliefs that codifies how people study and create. “We consider within the energy of play,” Goldin says. “And this new campus will be sure that creativity is the beating coronary heart of the whole lot we do.”
Bricks, bricks, bricks
The brand new campus was created by the Danish agency CEBRA Architects, primarily based in Aarhus, however a whole lot of Lego staff offered enter at numerous levels of the design. Lego says the inventive course of concerned creating and constructing the campus utilizing bricks—then rebuilding it to iterate on concepts. This infinite loop of designers utilizing bricks to design buildings that shall be house for designers that may use bricks to design new objects made from bricks could open a darkish magical portal to a parallel dimension the place Everything Is Awesome.
One actually cool characteristic of the Innovation Campus is the world’s largest library of Lego parts, that includes a group of roughly 20,000 items. It’s a dwelling archive of creativity—and a nod to the sheer vary of potentialities inherent in a single brick. The library is not only an archive, however a useful resource that designers and product builders will draw on as they conceptualize future units, concepts, and experiences.
Past fostering creativity, the Lego Innovation Campus has one other focus: sustainability. This has been a core a part of the Danish firm’s company plans, regardless of its struggles to find a green replacement to the petroleum-based plastic used to make Lego bricks. However Lego says the brand new campus is constructed round this precept from the collection of supplies to power use methods.
“Sustainability has been on the core of the design,” Goldin says. “It’s about greater than only a constructing—it’s about making accountable decisions in each a part of the method, from materials sourcing to power use.”
The constructing is constructed with Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified timber for its core and partitions. FSC certification ensures that the wooden is sourced from responsibly managed forests, minimizing environmental affect whereas sustaining the structural integrity required for such an expansive area. The design is aiming to get LEED Platinum certification, one of many highest requirements for sustainable buildings, which evaluates the whole lot from power effectivity to water conservation. Attaining Platinum means lowering power use by no less than 30%, restoring native biodiversity via native plantings, and implementing superior water recycling programs to reduce consumption.