Brick by brick: LEGO enthusiasts play well with Colorado

How will Colorado celebrate its sesquicentennial this summer? In lots of ways, and one of them might be surprising: LEGO.

This particular project got its start back in 2024, when Amanda Clapham, who works for Visitor Services at the Colorado State Capitol, got in touch with Larry Lippard, then-president of the Denver LEGO Users Group (DENLUG), for help celebrating Colorado’s 149th birthday with some home-built LEGO models. That turned out to be a dry run for the major mission: a LEGO-built scale model of both the Senate and House chambers of the Capitol, to be placed on permanent display in honor of the Centennial State.

The project is massive — requiring over 50,000 bricks just for the two chambers — and may grow larger, if the legislature wants representational mini-figs of prominent Colorado lawmakers, or even an expansion that would add some of the facade and the golden dome to the final product. It’ll be unveiled during the Colorado Day celebration at the Statehouse on Aug. 1.

Meanwhile, DENLUG is awaiting the delivery of the LEGO bricks before it can begin construction; the club is planning for a pretty busy summer.

Like a lot of kids from the Boomers through today, Lippard (himself a member of Gen X) recalls building sets in his basement with Mike “The Comic Consultant” Murray. “But you get deeper into high school, girls and all that, and you go into what a lot of LEGO hobbyists call ‘the Dark Ages,’ where you kind of move away from it for a while,” he explains.

But in adulthood, Lippard and other members of DENLUG — not to mention more casual LEGO lovers — came back to the hobby. Sometimes, as with Lippard, that re-awakening happens because your own children inspire a return. “When my kids were about ten,” Lippard recalls, “I started to get them into it because I remembered how fun it was, how creative a toy it was. I dug out all my old LEGO and started buying my kids new sets, and for some years LEGO was something we did together.”

By the time Lippard’s kids had entered their own “Dark Ages” in their teens, Lippard was already re-hooked.

Lippard got into DENLUG through one of the Bricks & Minifigs stores in the Denver area. “My sister told me about this LEGO store down by Southwest Plaza, so I went to check it out,” Lippard says. “DENLUG was there building a display, and I got to talking to some of the ladies there from that group. I was like, ‘Wait, there’s a group of fellow nerds like me? Where do I sign?'”

He got involved in the group quickly and deeply. “It turned into almost a full-time thing,” he says. “I dove in headfirst.”

It’s an easy dive to make. LEGO has been part of the American toy shelf for more than half a century. Founded as a Danish company back in 1932, it took the name LEGO from the Danish phrase “leg godt,” meaning “play well.” In 1958, the familiar stud-and-tube coupling brick was patented; by the late ’70s, mini-figures were on the market. Later still, LEGO had licenses for specific properties: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Disney, Marvel and DC, Jaws and much more. By the 2000s, there were even video games based on those properties, a trend continuing today with the recently released “LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight.”

Lippard’s becoming enraptured with LEGO all over again — “It became something of an obsession,” he jovially admits — is fairly common for adult LEGO builders. This was never just for kids; there’s a reason each box sets the age range from “4 to 99” years. Which is a good thing, because kids don’t have the patience for the largest LEGO set (the soon-to-be-released Architecture Sagrada Família at 12,060 pieces), or the scratch for the more expensive ones (the 2025 LEGO Death Star — also the largest Star Wars set at over 9,000 pieces — retailed for a single penny under a cool grand).

As an adult, among the most intoxicating elements of the hobby are conventions devoted completely to LEGO. Lippard went to his first in 2022, Brickworld Chicago. “It was a whole new addiction,” he says. “It’s the biggest LEGO convention, and my mind was just blown. The talent, the massive displays, how cool the community was.”

According to Lippard, LEGO conventions are unlike, say, the FAN EXPO experience. “It’s almost impossible to compare the experience to any other convention,” he notes. “LEGO conventions aren’t trade shows. Most conventions are made up primarily of vendors. At LEGO events, it’s primarily artists who aren’t selling anything — they’re just displaying and sharing what they do.”

One of the most challenging aspects of displaying those creations at shows is the transit: keeping those structures safe across the many miles in a U-Haul. “Securing a LEGO display for travel is almost a hobby unto itself,” laughs Lippard. “We don’t glue these things. Unless you’re building something for permanent display, the whole idea is that you make something, show it off, and then take it apart again to build something even cooler.”

The Colorado sesquicentennial project will be one of those permanent displays, cemented together with a special LEGO glue for display in perpetuity. “The Capitol has a museum on-site,” Lippard explains, “and it’s so cool because some of us will be able to have our names on permanent display with the LEGO work.”

And for their next big show, DENLUG will once again be a major presence at the FAN EXPO Denver event — though Lippard mournfully reports that their space gets smaller by the year. “We’re just an attraction,” he says. “We’re not selling anything. We’re there to share some of what we do, and to entertain people and spread the word about the hobby and the group. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun.”

That isn’t the motto of DENLUG and the LEGO arts in general … but it could be. And it makes sense for a state like colorful Colorado, where so many work to climb a mountain just for fun. This LEGO model fits the state like a brick on a baseplate. You might even say it matches up “godt.”

Find DENLUG at FAN EXPO Denver, May 28 through 31, at the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street. For more information on the club, check its website, denlug.net, or Facebook page, facebook.com/DENLUGCO.