Box of surprises: Sydney Living Museum’s LEGO® exhibition

Everyone from 0 to 100 is invited to come experience Sydney Living Museum’s extraordinary skyscrapers from Asia and Australia, all built with LEGO® bricks.
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Visitors can create their own inspirations and place them in the exhibition. (Photo credit: James Horan for Sydney Living Museum)

From December to April, Sydney Living Museum (SLM) will present the world-premiere of Towers of Tomorrow with LEGO® Bricks at the Museum of Sydney. An exhibition that combines architecture and design will inspire and tickle the imagination of viewers of all ages.

This lively and creative experience of the exhibition would be an excellent start to the holiday season. Gary Crockett, interpretation curator at SLM said that this was a great opportunity to experience a roomful of extraordinary models.

‘There’s something nostalgic and sentimental about LEGO®  – everyone’s played with it and everyone knows about LEGO®.

‘It’s a really well loved toy, and here we have an opportunity to see some astonishingly built sculptures.

‘This is one of a kind installation, and on top of that there’s the invitation to be inspired and create something yourself,’ he said.

Towers of Tomorrow with LEGO® Bricks has something for everyone. There’s architecture, the future of living and working in the skies, there’s also an opportunity of seeing world-class buildings side by side.

The exhibition features amazing skyscrapers from Asia and Australia constructed from LEGO® bricks with breathtaking architectural detail and accuracy by Australia’s Ryan McNaught, the Southern Hemisphere’s only certified LEGO® professional.

The 18 towers include the Infinity Tower (Brisbane), Q1 (Gold Coast), Eureka Tower (Melbourne) and Central Park Tower (Perth), along with the iconic Sydney Tower. The Asian towers include Taiwan’s Taipei 101, Japan’s Tokyo Skytree, Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers, Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands, and the highly anticipated self-contained ‘vertical’ city that will be China’s Shanghai Tower.

Crockett said that initially the exhibition was going to look primarily at Australian buildings, but the focus quickly changed.

‘In fact we were looking at the Sydney skyline and realised that this was bigger than Sydney, and wouldn’t it be great to compare the Sydney skyline to some of the extraordinary things that are going on around the world.

‘The Shanghai Tower for example is 632 metres tall while the tallest building in Sydney, which is the Sydney Tower at the moment, is 270 metres tall.’

Crockett said Australians remain very concerned about the buildings dwarfing our cities, but over in Asia a building over 500 metres tall is very much a reality and felt it was interesting to put these buildings side by side and raise those kinds of questions.

The 18 towers from across Asia and Australia in the Towers of Tomorrow with LEGO® Bricks exhibition took 2000 hours and 400,000 bricks of LEGO® to create and the tallest LEGO® building at the exhibition is over 3.2 meters tall.

Tickets are on sale for the Towers of Tomorrow with LEGO® Bricks exhibition with $15 for Adults & Children, $45 Family, $5 Members, 2 years and under free. To book click here

Jasmeet Sahi
About the Author
Jasmeet Sahi is a freelance writer and editor based in Melbourne.