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Have you ever sat down and thought of something really weird and then shared it with friends and everyone thinks through it? Technically that’s a “thought experiment” and usually it ends with people thinking hard about the idea. Wikipedia says “A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.”
The folks over at The Toy Zone went beyond a thought experiment with their question “What if 10 World Landmarks were recreated in LEGO?” by actually recreating LIFE SIZE equivalents to famous landmarks virtually and estimating the piece count and price, compared to the cost of the original.
They’ve done some incredibly detailed work – creating the monuments in Bricklink’s Studio app and then applying additional effects (sky) and setting the lighting and perspective to match their reference photos. The result is astounding – you can see on their site and below how you can slide between the original and LEGO version for comparison.
The autho
We’re going to pick the Taj Mahal as our example. It’s one of the monuments they chose, and also something that LEGO has produced but is no longer available. The LEGO version below is inspiring, but I think the domes could have had more detail (and more bricks) to show a better/smoother surface at this size, but it’s amazing still.
The following is directly from The Toy Zone article – all credit to them for their amazing work.
| Cost of building the Taj Mahal in real life (adjusted for inflation) | $1 billion (source) |
| Cost of building the Taj Mahal in Lego (estimated) | $2.1 billion |
You will need:
🧱 176 types of brick
🤯 35,007,786,500 bricks in total
💰 Cost of bricks: $2,186,819,336 / £1,629,103,866
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