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Jeff’s LEGO Addiction

every little Architect needs some LEGO inspiration

It's no secret: Jeff is obsessed with LEGO. In fact, he's now brought it all back from his parents' home, and set up a LEGO room in his own house that would make any LEGO lover swoon.

Jeff Pelletier is the Managing Principal and Founder of Board & Vellum, an architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture firm in Seattle, Washington.
Jeff Pelletier
March 19, 2011

It is no secret that the reason I'm an architect today is probably tied to my love of LEGO as a child. This amazing little toy was always the one toy that my frugal parents felt OK with buying because they knew that I wouldn't outgrow it, that I would simply add them to my collection. I would spend hours at a time building cities, skyscrapers, homes, offices, pretty much anything really. I learned to spend my time looking at the real built environment around me and think of ways I could build that in LEGO. Eventually, I got to creating in LEGO, and thinking of ways I could make the built environment even better. It wasn't long before I truly realized that I was only ever meant to be an architect.

Years later, an empty room in my house taunted me. We were young, didn't have much furniture, and this little room in our Ravenna bungalow, at the time, sat empty. Around the same time, my parents' house was being emptied in preparation for a move, and it came time to move my old childhood LEGO collection out to Seattle. The empty room soon saw a new life as I filled it with my old collection. Through the assistance of "enabler" friends, that childhood collection (ironic that it seemed so massive to me at the time) grew into one much larger and gave me a full palette of LEGO bricks and pieces to create with.

Today, my "LEGO lab," as I've been calling it, fills a large room in my house and there's a second one dedicated to showcasing my creations. While the nerd in me can't help but build spaceships from time to time, my true love of the built environment keeps shining through, and I've built dense urban environments and proud single-family homes that would fit right in in Seattle. I am excited to find the client who is ready for a LEGO model of their house to be built alongside their real piece of architecture. I'm fond of saying that hiring and working with an architect should be a fun process: why not start with some little plastic bricks sure to inspire the imagination of the next little architect out there?

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