There’s a New World’s Tallest Lego Tower — For Now

Fun & Games

6,000 builders armed with half a million bricks built a Lego tower nine inches higher than a Chilean tower built last fall, topping off at 102 feet, 3 inches.

What they don’t tell you is that there’s a metal pole down the middle — visible toward the end of the video — which takes some of the challenge out of the project: there’s no chance of collapse. In fairness to the Brazilian effort, however, the previous record holders (like the 2008 tower in Vienna, a tower built in 2010 in Munich, and a 100′ 10″ tower in Legoland Günzberg, built in 2010) did as well. Lego simply doesn’t have the strength to stack that high. Even if the tower hadn’t won the record, the organizers deserve credit for wrangling 500,000 bricks and thousands of schoolkids.

4 thoughts on “There’s a New World’s Tallest Lego Tower — For Now

  1. Todd Thuma says:

    Actually, the tower is free standing with the pole only present for safety. LEGO Company has done this several times at different Legoland parks and events around the world. The bricks do a great job distributing the weight and the lower levels are not a single brick thick as the video shows. Only the upper layers are so thin. The base at the bottom has been solid in the past (I can’t speak for this one) with the lower 6 feet or so being built of about 1 foot thick walls. That way if the tower sways in the wind, the wall is sturdier than one brick thick. The tower also tapers as you go up. Every so often, guy-wires, which connect to the pole, are worked around the growing tower by removing bricks to present a hole. The wires attach to the pole and not the bricks. The pole prevents the tower from collapsing onto the assembled crowd watching from below. The bricks would simply fall against the pole and then fall downward.

  2. JAmes says:

    Could they make it pyramid-shaped? Less chance of that collapsing.

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My interests include writing, electronics, RPGs, scifi, hackers & hackerspaces, 3D printing, building sets & toys. @johnbaichtal nerdage.net

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