Imperial Build: Meet the US Architect Who Built the Forbidden City Entirely Out of Lego

Sometimes it takes a new, smaller perspective to fully appreciate the complexity of objects. While that has been one of the biggest draws of Danish toy company Lego since it began making miniature assembly kits in 1932, the trend of building miniature scenes with the fewest number of pieces, so-called "mini builds," as well as exquisitely detailed and true-to-scale facsimiles of real people, objects, and even entire cities has exploded in the past few years.

No doubt part of the proliferation of these ingenious models has been fueled by playful competition among builders on social media platforms such as Instagram, which is exactly where I stumbled across the work of architect, Chicagoan, and Lego enthusiast Rocco Buttliere's latest build: a 1:650 scale model of the Forbidden City.

The first thing you notice about Buttliere's build is the sheer amount of detail he was able to cram into a small space. This, in essence, is the entire goal of such a build, using preexisting Lego pieces – 87,000 in this case – in a way that may not be immediately obvious: grey piping lines the bridges, green hot dogs stand in for garden details, and disembodied hands literally hold up the eaves of the roofs. With a little imagination and a lot of patience, the possibilities seem limitless.

Having once been a massive Lego fan myself, I geeked out and got to writing Buttliere some questions about how exactly he accomplished this mammoth feat in diminutive engineering. Captions provided by Buttliere provide background as to the design as well as facts he learned while researching the model.

Can you tell us how one becomes a Lego artist?
I can only speak for myself as there certainly is no standard path or any specific business model involved in becoming a Lego artist. Having been building with Lego my entire life, and growing up just outside Chicago, I began taking an interest in architecture around the age of 14 in 2009. I wanted a way to express this interest creatively which is when I decided to use the material I had available (which were Lego bricks) to design and build unique scale models of famous skyscrapers. Quite early on, I realized there was a whole Lego fan community from which I could draw inspiration to apply to my own work, as well as numerous opportunities for public exhibitions, which I started attending in 2011. For several years afterward, I simply kept designing and building more landmarks, always keeping them at a consistent 1:650 scale in an effort to provide a proportional interplay between each model while exhibiting at events.

This consistency eventually paid off in a way that I could never have imagined. In 2015, after three years of architecture studies at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and with roughly 40 models in my growing body of work, I was approached by two separate event coordinators at the yearly Brickworld convention. Both individuals were organizing their own events and were interested in having my work at each. One of these connections resulted in a long-term “Featured Artist” gig with the touring stateside BrickUniverse events, while the other connection resulted in several exhibitions in the UK. 

With a steady volume of commissioned work as well as a mostly regular slate of exhibitions, I am truly grateful to continue exploring the endless wealth of architecture subject matter in my work while being able to regularly interact with the public.

How did you come to build the Forbidden City out of Lego? How do you tend to choose your projects in general?
The Forbidden City is my latest commission piece for the Museu da Imaginação in São Paulo. Previously, I had done replicas of a few of my smaller historical landmarks for this client, including Mount Rushmore and Hagia Sophia. At the end of 2019, we ventured into our first large landscape which was a 66,000-part layout of Imperial Rome. That project was a huge success and the on-site installation went off without a hitch – aside from a few minor repairs – and we immediately began discussing ideas for further landscapes. Forbidden City was one of the first concepts we envisioned and soon after, we had agreed on terms and I began designing the piece.

Lately, I would say that much of my work has been decided between myself and my clients. I am incredibly fortunate to have a client such as the Museu da Imaginação that is willing to invest in such large and detailed works. It certainly is not the norm to have a client who values your creative input enough to allow the choice of subject matter to ultimately be a mutual decision. Similarly, my personal work is much more subject to my own discretion, although I always make certain to try and choose landmarks which I believe will provide unique challenges and lead to novel parts usage and building techniques. Nowadays, my personal work goes straight into my BrickUniverse gallery upon completion, which is especially beneficial as I’m able to receive immediate public feedback; a gauge which is not wholly determinative of my future works, but nonetheless is quite impactful in terms of refining my techniques as well as seeing what the viewers connect with most.

Can you walk us through the design process – what tools do you use to create such a piece and to select the pieces you need to use? How long did it take in total?
Designing a new piece is undoubtedly the most time-consuming part of the overall process. Before I design anything with Lego, I always start by researching historical information as well as the architectural precedents that informed the design of the subject. With the Forbidden City, this meant researching the founding and innovative urban planning of Beijing along with understanding that traditional Chinese architecture was designed such that the lowliest of buildings consists of the same structural components and elements of even the grandest palace halls. Establishing this baseline was incredibly critical to ensuring that the design language of the 900-plus buildings within the walls of Forbidden City would be homogeneous while speaking to the theretofore unprecedented spatial composition of the entire complex.

As soon as I felt I had reached a critical mass of information, I began to design the complex in the Bricklink software known as Studio. This free design program lets you “pick-and-place” individual Lego parts to build whatever you can imagine. Nevertheless, as with any digital design which will ultimately be built with physical bricks, you need to be sure that the parts you are using actually exist in the colors and quantities you desire. Some Lego colors are far rarer than others, and this economy of scale is something I keep in mind whenever I design such a large and comprehensive piece; especially those on a commission budget. The yellow roof tiles and red walls of Forbidden City led to extensive use of Bright Light Orange and Dark Red Lego bricks throughout. It would be hard to overstate the impact these color choices had on the overall design. Bright Light Orange, for example, turned out to be a far better choice than Lego Yellow, as the former allowed for parts usage such as “dragon jaws” for the hip-gable roofs of the Meridian Gate and Hall of Supreme Harmony, as well as various “kitchen utensils” and “carrot stalks” to achieve some of the subtle curves of rooftops throughout the complex.

All in all, the design was subdivided into seven separate stages, consists of roughly 87,000 parts, and took 400-plus hours in 43 days to design.

You’ve previously built seemingly mammoth projects like an entire Rome cityscape (as previously mentioned), Mount Rushmore, and the World Trade Center. What specific challenges did building the Forbidden City pose?
I’m glad you brought up those specific examples as they really are quite different from the Forbidden City. Mount Rushmore and the former WTC are such iconic landmarks and by their nature, they lend themselves well to artistic representation as the viewer can immediately understand what they are viewing: to say nothing of the landmarks throughout the Imperial Rome landscape like the Flavian Amphitheatre (Colosseum) or Circus Maximus. Forbidden City, on the other hand, had to adhere to centuries of traditional vernacular while simultaneously imbuing the more iconic landmarks like the aforementioned Meridian Gate and Hall of Supreme Harmony with a sense of instant recognition. The other side of that coin was the challenge of giving such a strictly hierarchical and orthogonal complex a sense of vitality as a necessary reprieve from such uniformity.  

In addressing the first challenge, I made conscious design decisions to ensure that the parts and colors used in the smaller, more tucked away halls and belvederes were in keeping with the parts and colors of the most revered and prominent palace structures. One of the most obvious examples of this was the decision to use Lego flex tubes for the red portico columns as well as Bright Light Orange flex tubes to accent the roof gables while providing a uniform attachment point for the thousands of minifigure hands that I have used for extra detail in representing roof tiles. Typically, I am averse to using any cut-to-fit Lego flex tubes for aesthetic purposes, but I ultimately felt it necessary in this case as it speaks to the standardized nature and analogous structural elements of traditional Chinese architecture.

For the second challenge, I felt that it was important to imbue a feeling of vitality across the broad complex. The most obvious solution to this was developing a concept for Peking willows (a tree unique to this locale) which had the added benefit of ascribing a true singularity to this piece among my body of work. One of the lighter touches toward breaking up the regularity was the use of Lego Technic tread links representing the balustrades throughout the complex. These balustrades outline everything from the rectangular Xumi base of the Outer Court’s three halls to the curving boundaries of the winding Golden Water River. The dual implementation of using these elements for straight and curved purposes helps to avoid what perhaps might otherwise have been an overwhelming regularity – not to mention the fact that the visual design of theses elements evokes the “circle in a square” symbology of “heaven on earth” from traditional Chinese teachings.

It’s clear from your social media posts that you do a fair bit of historical research while undertaking a build. Was there any part of the history that particularly stuck with you?
There were certainly many aspects of the historical research that I was particularly intrigued by and taken with, in this case. One of the most obvious is that I happened to design and build a complete landscape model of the Forbidden City during 2020, which marks the 600th anniversary of its original completion. The actual efforts in constructing the complex are fascinating to me as well; particularly the enormous logs used for columns of several major structures. These columns were logs of precious Phoebe zhennan wood, referred to as nanmu at the time of construction. Found only in the jungles of southwestern China, the task of logging the necessary 100,000 nanmu logs was a perilous endeavor: so much so that it was said at the time that a thousand men went into the forest, but only 500 came out. The logs then had to be floated down from the mountains and thousands of miles north to Beijing. The journey of each log took up to four years. This incredibly costly material was not used in subsequent restorations following fires which destroyed several of the original buildings.

From an architect’s point of view, what elements of the Forbidden City’s design blew you away?
In addition to the aforementioned economy of scale in its construction, I am most impressed with the overall stately grandeur and meticulously crafted axial procession of Forbidden City. Unlike many of the more sprawling Western historical pieces I have done, this one was unique in its overall symmetry and balance. Sometimes this can prove to be a bit monotonous with Lego bricks as it’s very much in keeping with their predominantly rectangular shapes, but I think that regularity only further highlights the ornamental details of the structures throughout.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to get into to-scale Lego builds?
My best advice would be the words of Augustus, “Festina lente,” or “Make haste, slowly.” I really connect with this adage in regard to my work as it reflects the nature of the design-build process being much more of a marathon than a sprint. This applies not only to individual projects but to the body of work as a whole. In taking the time to slow down and give each individual piece their due, I believe it allows the concepts to simmer and develop more wholly in your mind and, subsequently, the work itself.

What’s your next project? Do you have your eye on any other Chinese landmarks?
'"What’s my next project?" is what I ask myself even as early as wrapping up the design phase of something I still need to build!  Aside from commissions, I don’t exactly plan these things out in a lengthy to-do list, but what I can tell you is that I am currently building my next large landscape. This one, similar to the Forbidden City, is an architectural style/period I had not yet explored before designing. As long as I’m dropping teasers, I will also say that despite having fewer parts than the 87,000 used in the Forbidden City, the new landscape took a staggering 500-plus hours to design over 70 days, as opposed to 400-plus hours in 43 days for the former. At the end of the day (or project, more appropriately), I think it comes down to a gut feeling in deciding what it is that you design next. Obviously, some of these are commissions and you’re not always free to pursue exactly what you’d initially like. I have always found, however, that this gut feeling can always be found if you invest enough time in research and enough thought into the kinds of parts you are using for the design.

You can see more of Buttliere's incredible work via his Instagram, Flickr, or official website.

READ: 600 Years and 24 Emperors Later, Forbidden City Celebrates a Milestone

Images courtesy of Rocco Buttliere