This page either does not exist or is currently unavailable.You can also search for something on our site below.On invitation from the White House, Shubham Banerjee , the creator of Braigo, was among the more than 100 students, entrepreneurs, engineers, and researchers from 25 states — all of whom love to “Make” stuff to attend the first ever White House Maker Faire and witnessed President Obama declare June 18th as a National Day of Making through a proclamation. I would like to thank the following individuals /organizations publicly: 1) Danielle Carpenter, Senior Policy Advisor, White House OSTP 2) Kelly Hickmann , Flashpoint PR for diligently working with the White House to organize my participation. And of-course to the Lego Company for taking me for a ride since Braigo became public. 3) I can’t thank enough Caleb Kraft from Make, who has provided the encouragement and support since I participated at Maker Faire in San Mateo in 2014. “Our parents and our grandparents created the world’s largest economy and strongest middle class not by buying stuff, but by building stuff — by making stuff, by tinkering and inventing and building;
by making and selling things first in a growing national market and then in an international market — stuff “Made in America.” — President Barack Obama at the first-ever White House Maker Faire, June 18, 2014Toy fads come and go, but Lego is in no danger of pulling a Tamagotchi. Revenue is up, more movies are on the way, and complex building kits continue to burn up the free time of kids (and adults) worldwide.All this leads us to wonder: If Lego continues its slow march toward world domination, what are the odds that some lovable maniac will construct an entire life-size home from the colorful plastic bricks? And at what cost?We contacted designer Sean Kenney, one of only a dozen or so LEGO Certified Professionals on the planet. Yes, that’s his job title—reserved for people who are, he said, “actively, physically, tangibly using their product in some creative and commercial manner” and engaging with the public.He and his team have built life-size polar bears, 6-foot-tall dogs, and portraits made from nothing but plastic bricks.
The dude knows how to tackle big projects and is regularly asked to think on a grand scale using nothing but tiny parts.As an artist and designer, his work isn’t cheap. But a life-size house? That’s a different set of bricks. “Let’s take a microcosmic example,” Kenney said. “A four-foot-by-eight-foot sheet of drywall costs about $10 at the hardware store. If I just wanted to build a sheet of drywall—not a house but just the drywall—it’s about $2,000 retail for the Lego bricks. And then you need the labor. It’s about 9,000 pieces in that sheet of drywall.” Assembly time for that one sheet: about a week.So, let’s get crazy and assume this house is being financed by an eccentric billionaire with mountains of cash to burn. Even money can’t conquer physics.“The interesting thing that we all know about gravity is that it likes to pull things down,” Kenney said. Which isn’t a problem if you’re building toward the sky and creating monolithic Lego structures.
But, he said, “when you want to do a large horizontal thing, that’s tough. That’s why we have I-beams … and stuff we build big, strong things with.”Lego, of course, doesn’t offer huge, 12-feet long pieces. A Lego I-beam would have to be “built from thousands of little pieces and they’re going to want to split apart.” Ditto for ceilings and floors.So that’s one huge challenge. The other large hurdle, Kenney explained, is that in standard construction, nothing is perfectly straight. Your home can be a tenth of a degree off its foundation, or a wall may jut out by a sixteenth of an inch, and that’s OK. You can bend and shimmy wood and other building materials without causing any major structural issues. But Lego bricks are incredibly precise blocks. They can’t be forced or shimmied.Take your foundation, for example: “Say you pour a concrete slab. It’s probably as level as it would ever need to be for the intents and purposes of a home, but compared to the hundredths of a millimeter in Lego bricks, there are pits and pocks and slopes and valleys all over the place, and so the challenge of trying to work around that without getting cracks and fissures in the Lego model would probably be the single biggest physical challenge that you could face.”
So, is the idea of building a Lego house impossible? In fact, the BBC’s James May (along with a merry crew) built a home using over 816 million Lego bricks in 2009. The house, a feat of engineering and enthusiasm, has since been deconstructed after a bid to sell it to Legoland in Windsor fell through. But are traditional construction materials in any danger of being usurped by Legos?A house, especially one that someone intended to live in on a daily basis, would be an enormous expense, surely in the millions of dollars. Insurance would be astronomical as there’s a very real chance the home could collapse at any moment. Adding insult to possible injury, Lego bricks aren’t water-tight.So, to summarize: If you had the bank account of Scrooge McDuck, the architectural genius of Howard Roark, and an infinite amount of patience, you could do it. But, ask yourself, would you want to live in a Lego house? Maybe for a few hours, but we’re guessing that sleeping on Lego sheets might not be the life you dreamed of building.
A home worth talking about? CNN's Magic Wall has long been an interesting (and at one point innovative) way to see election night results in real time. Today, news organizations and journalists are trying out some new experiments in both high- and low-tech election night visualizations. At The Washington Post, you can watch two 3D printers duel-build tiny replicas of the White House in red and blue while a designer and developer Tim Meko fills in the map by hand on a white board in the background. Each model represents the 270 votes needed to win the electoral college, said Jeremy Gilbert, director of digital initiatives. The candidate who gets there first will end up with a completed White House (in red or blue, of course, depending.) At one point, Gilbert thought about creating a Lego White House to show the results, but when he saw that Mashable used the clicking block toys to illustrate the 2014 election, he went back this question: How could they represent what this election really means?`
His answer: "Who gets to be the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?" The Post invested in two 3D printers, which cost about $2,000 each. They'll start and stop the tiny White House building as electoral college votes come in and air it all on Facebook Live. "Basically it’s an in-motion informational graphic," Gilbert said. NPR's trying something new this year, too: a public art installation. Starting this afternoon, an artist will draw and fill in the electoral college map in NPR's newsroom. That live art will unfold as a backdrop to NPR's Facebook Live feed. And in Texas, Dallas Morning News political reporter Hannah Wise plans to cross stitch in the map after her shift. Wise, who started cross stitching comments and sharing them on Instagram as a way to unwind after work, will photograph each state as it fills in and share a video of them when she's done. Make sure you vote so you're counted in my #election2016 embroidered Electoral College map! — Hannah Wise (@hwise29) November 8, 2016