As a city grows and evolves, it leaves behind evidence of what it once was, so I wanted to create a modular building that reflected the history of itself. In this case, a Beaux-Arts style building built in, let’s say, 1902 or 1903. What would a building like that look like in 2024?

It was probably built as a bank, or maybe a law firm, but now the grand white stone and crystal-lamped relief that adorns the facade of its entrance welcomes you into a humble sandwich shop.

The building’s original ornate wooden staircase is (mostly) gone, the area where it once sat hollowed out to awkwardly become a small (and crowded) bicycle repair shop. The steps outside its entrance were replaced at some point by an ADA-compliant ramp, which makes it convenient for moving bikes in and out of a space not designed for them.

Around the back of the building, 20th-century utilities were inelegantly "carved" into the back corner of the building, and sometime later, an old telephone pole became a 5G cell tower. A billboard frame falls into disrepair because newer construction in the neighborhood has long since blocked the line of sight to that side of the building, but it’s not worth removing outright. That satellite dish has been there for years, but it probably isn’t hooked up to anything.

A back door and stairwell was installed to retrofit a second floor office, now home to a small video game development team. They work remotely with people all over the world, but wanted a place to feel productive together (and record their podcast!).

Mismatched materials, awkward angles, everything repurposed. But the people of a modern city make it work, make it their own, and it’s beautiful.

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In terms of expressing these ideas in Lego, I wanted the building instructions to reflect it as well, so I tried to add moments as you build where you are invited to make guesses to why the fictional inhabitants of the building throughout the years would arrange, assemble, or re-assemble things in a particular way.

Once complete, every viewing angle on the building reflects a different aspect of its history, and asks the viewer to actively wonder about the space (ya gotta give people motivation to take the roof off and look inside!). From the outside, there are plenty of angles where you wouldn’t be able to tell that the building is home to a sandwich shop, but when you look inside it’s hard to imagine what else it could have ever been. You can see bikes hanging from the walls though the big windows on both sides of the second floor of the bike shop, revealing that there’s no “second floor” at all. But the old staircase from the office to the roof passes through it. What did that part of the building look like when it was first built?, you wonder. You can take clues from the model but you also need to extrapolate the details that have been lost to time.

In truth, I left some of those particulars ambiguous for myself as well. As the designer I needed to have some of the answers, but I didn’t want to have all of them. There are stories to be found in the model, but they’re just hints. The hope is that builders would have enough space to finish them for themselves, or perhaps leave them unfinished, because I wanted to replicate the relationship that I have with buildings like this in real-life.

And it being a modular building is important, too, because the context for a building like this becomes richer when situated next to other buildings!