The US architect and Lego maker Rocco Buttliere from Chicago built the Vatican City on a small scale. From 67,000 Lego blocks, he built the 1.30 by 1.70 meter model on a scale of 1: 650, as reported by the portal kathisch.de.
Although he has already seen a lot and rebuilt more than 50 buildings in Lego, the real Vatican “totally blew him away” during a visit in November 2019, Buttliere said in an interview with kathisch.de. “All these world-famous sculptures and frescoes”, the abundance of cultural heritage and the variety of architectural styles brought him “so far that I wanted to build a model of the entire Vatican City”.
According to him, the planning of the model took significantly longer than the actual construction. Research, 3-D studies, design and construction in one piece of software took him 500 hours over 70 days. The actual construction then took about 300 hours, with lots of stones that he had never used before. Around 1,300 individual parts are custom-made. According to the architect who studied, he has never modeled Renaissance or Baroque buildings.
Colosseum, Hagia Sophia and Notre-Dame already reconstructed
Buttliere said he hoped the model could travel with his other work in 2021 after the corona pandemic; in the USA, “but also gladly to Europe – preferably to Italy, of course”.
The Lego maker has already made replicas of the Colosseum and Circus Maximus. The Forbidden City in Beijing, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris are also part of the portfolio.
After Buttliere graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology, his Lego works became known through exhibitions. Little by little, people came up to him and ordered models. So he was able to set up his own Lego building to order and with exhibitions. The Vatican was his private project, he said.
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