Building: IFI2

To Build a Building

Article by Matija Pužar
Photography by Matija Pužar and Øystein Christiansen

The auditorium is packed. People are murmuring to each other, waiting anxiously to see what is actually going to happen. And there she is, the minister herself! We didn’t have to wait much longer for the big news – the budget has finally been approved and the long awaited new building of the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, so called IFI2, will become reality!

The talk was quite short, not offering many details on the project itself. Afterwards, I went down to see the miniature model and, I can’t say I felt very enlightened about what it was going to look like. A wild idea started brewing inside of me.

I tried not thinking about it too much, but I knew that little ideas, that tickled and nagged and refused to go away, should never be ignored (yes, I do love the movie “Babe”). I shared the idea with my co-workers and friends – the amount of support was extraordinary, mostly between “you’re completely crazy” and “oh grow up”. That was exactly what I had to hear – it finally gave me the courage to go to Terje Knudsen, the project’s User Coordinator at the Department, and ask directly, “Do you think that the Department might be interested in having a LEGO version of the new building?” The next morning the two of us were sitting in a cab on the way to the office of the architects who designed the building, Lund Hagem Arkitekter AS. The architects were thrilled by the idea! But none of us had a clear picture on how big the model should be. Minifig scale was clearly out of the question, so my initial idea was to have it relatively small, maybe 50-100cm long. The decision was quite unanimous – it was to be in a 1:100 scale, giving it the approximate length of (sigh!) 2m. OK, a bit more than I planned, but hey, that meant the possibility for more details, more challenges, and last but not least, more LEGO! And since I was not the one paying for the bricks, how could I say no? I was given a few kilograms of drawings with a “good luck” note attached.

The next few months were spent planning how to transform the design into a LEGO construction, as well as how to get hold of all the pieces I needed. This was to be by far my biggest LEGO project ever (considering that by that time I had only built train models, this was not hard), so I had to be careful. And the fact that all I had were drawings and nothing real to look at didn’t quite help either.

The initial calculations had shown that a bit more than 10,000 pieces ought to be enough (Hey, the last guy I know that used a phrase like that became the richest man in the world! We’ll see whether it still works.) Could I have been more wrong? This ended up being merely a quarter of the final amount of pieces needed. Another question popped up, and that was how in world I would move a two meter by one meter model to the Department. The solution was to make it modular; having the modules on a total of 18 baseplates (ten 48×48, seven 32×32 and one 16×32).

I was just ready to place the first order and, while checking about some budget details with Terje, I suddenly found out that the window pattern of the whole façade had slightly changed. Back to the drawing board (in my case, MLCad). Luckily I had not been that eager to draw the whole building before building it, but just the pattern, so not a lot of work had been lost. However, the new design, with narrow vertical windows, left only one possible solution – SNOT all the way, with a lot of black and transparent plates in different sizes. And the width of the windows coincidentally matched almost perfectly the height of LEGO plates!

After I managed to study a few kilos of new architectural drawings, the first of many kilos of LEGO (approximately 20,000 pieces) had finally arrived, marking the official start of the building process, and half of my bedroom officially not usable for anything else.

The following period of time went between building and waiting for new orders (as I was continuously finding out that I needed extra special pieces), and always keeping the architects up to date. They were constantly bombarded with questions about details not shown on drawings (producing megabytes of mails with new PDFs attached), meanings of specific types of lines used in them, as well as colours to be used. Colours were a bit hard for me to guess out of plain black and white drawings, and it was quite an essential issue when placing orders. The outside of the building, as well as the landscape, was done as best as I could according to the drawings, while the interior (small offices, toilets, stairs, etc.) was only done inside the lowest two floors, where there is glass all around and it can actually be seen. The whole building process has been carefully documented and put into the IFI2 gallery on Brickshelf. One curiosity is that by 2010, when the real building will be finished, the present old red underground trains (which I chose to include in the LEGO model) will be replaced by a completely new series, making the model a nice bridge between the present and the past. By pure coincidence, the old ones also happen to be more LEGOfriendly.

So, after four months the new building was ready for inspection. The designers were finally going to see their design implemented. They were allowed to find errors, as long as they kept those to themselves, but somehow they missed the last part of the message.Luckily, the details to be changed were quite small and the building was ready to move out soon, which somehow coincided with the exhibition in Skærbæk in Denmark. Boy was I glad having that monster out of my bedroom! So was my wife (whom I thank immensely for the patience!)

I was a bit anxious on whether the relatively fragile building would survive the long trip from Norway to Denmark, having in mind bad Norwegian roads and the ferry connection between the two countries. But it did and people seemed to like it, which made me happy. It had passed the first big test.