Lego’s largest, most complex set ever is a must-have for architecture lovers

There are 12,060 reasons to clear your weekend calendar. That is the piece count of the new Lego Sagrada Família. It’s the largest, most complex Lego set ever made by piece count, designed around one of the most visually audacious buildings in history. Priced at $800, it is not for everyone, but it sure beats paying for a flight to Barcelona to fight the swarms of tourists buzzing around this iconic landmark. [Photo: Lego] Lego has produced oversized sets before, many of them bloated monuments to their ambitions, but this one earns every single brick. Translating Antoni Gaudí’s century-spanning, organically erupting, mathematically impossible basilica into a display object you can fit on a bookshelf is not a flex. It is a massive design problem that Lego designers have solved masterfully. [Photo: Lego] The set, measuring 24 by 18.5 by 15 inches, is truly of Lego Architecture, a product line that translates most famous architectural marvels into bricks. It is a genuine attempt to bring one of the most visually complex buildings ever conceived—a cathedral that has been under continuous construction since 1882 and still isn’t finished—into a display object that captures its essence in an impressionistic way, but with apparent perfect precision. The mission, as Lego designer Rok Žgalin Kobe frames it, was not to simplify Gaudí’s vision but to honor it. “We felt an immense responsibility to do justice to the Sagrada Família through this design,” Žgalin Kobe says. “Our goal was to honor Gaudí’s vision with the utmost respect, capturing the rhythm of the basilica’s construction, its extraordinary complexity and ambition, and translating that into an immersive building experience.” [Photo: Lego] The key for Žgalin Kobe’s translation is not replication but psychological suggestion. The cluster of bricks that he uses to build the towers, for example, does not recreate the soaring stone nave brick by brick; it gives your br