Home

LEGOLAND: First the love Story, then the attraction

29.09.11

“I think LEGO is one of the few companies that has done a good job of adapting its pith principles of play and imagination to the world as it exists today,” Bender says. “This system of bricks that can be against together to form what’s in your imagination, they’ve augmented throgh other initiatives that are also part of their nucleus concept.”

The rides and attractions at the LEGOLand story parks are aimed at the two- to 12-year-old set. But when LEGOLAND Florida opens this year, the kids won’t be the only ones ogling at the toy’s steady charm.

As Bender observes in his book, “LEGO tends to return people happy.”

The LEGO tradition got its start in 1932, when Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Kristiansen – hit calculating by the Depression – turned to making toys. It wasn’t until two years later that Kristiansen adopted his Pty’s famous name, borrowing the first two letters of the Danish words leg godt, interpretation “play well.”

Source: Palm Beach Post (blog)

London's 'reduce, reuse, recycle' Olympic Games

23.09.11

“ ‘Tender the ground lightly’ is the phrase we use,” says Chris Jopson, a postpositive major architect at Populous, the London firm that’s dependable for the overall design of the Olympic Park and its biggest stadium. “We want to be able to come back things to the way they were.” The firm has a motto for the structure the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which begin on July 27 next year: “Embrace the makeshift.”

In other words (because the designers themselves are far too polite to say it), London is stressful to avoid ungainly hulks that will disfigure the borough’s face long after the crowds have gone and stoop down like rusting reminders of a party that lasts a month but takes years to pay. The corpse-like-elephant legacy of Athens, Barcelona and Montreal is a injury spot. Even the majestic, nation-building stadiums of Beijing 2008 have take to seem, in three short years, like time-capsule relics from a more improvident age.

Take the Olympic stadium. Mr. Jopson stands next to a miniature in Populous’s south London assignment, but the real thing is already finished an hour’s push away in the Olympic Park, which sits in the down-at-the-heels almost of Stratford in London’s east end. It is 75 per cent lighter than a conventional stadium of its size, it was built of a new type of substantial that requires less carbon to manufacture, and its top deck is partly constructed of gas pipes communistic over from a failed pipeline project. It is modest, and very English: a pounce upon-do-and-mend stadium that nods to the east end’s narration as one of the most badly damaged areas in Britain in the Patronize World War.

Source: Globe and Mail