Adam Reed Tucker built a LEGO model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West

Earlier this month, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation unveiled a new commission—architect and artist Adam Reed Tucker’s LEGO model of Wright’s Taliesin West. Tucker, one of 12 artists and designers authorized by LEGO to create commercial works with its products, spent days studying photographs and blueprints of the complex that served as Wright’s winter home and architecture school. Then, without the aid of digital renderings, he built the 180,000-piece model over the course of 380 hours.

“It’s a lot of trial and error,” say Tucker, who used 120 brick shapes and 11 colors to create the sculpture. Every piece affects the piece under or above it. It’s like solving the craziest Rubik’s Cube.”

At the unveiling ceremony, Tucker presented the model to 30 schoolchildren who had attended the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation architecture camp. The students constructed an orange orchard to complete the six-by-eight-foot work, which is the currently the largest model of a Wright building.

Tucker has built other models of famous structures. For LEGO’s Architecture line, he has designed purchasable kits of Wright’s Robie House, the Sydney Opera House, and the Brandenburg Gate, to name a few.

On view through April 30 at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona; franklloydwrighrg