Arnaud Gaudillat, a history professor in France, recalled breaking down in tears while watching television coverage of the flames that tore through Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019. “We couldn’t do anything but watch it burn,” he said.
Now, five years later, as hundreds of architects, engineers and metalworkers race to finish rebuilding the cathedral’s roof coverings and electrical wiring by the end of the year, Gaudillat will not be left out. He will build his own Notre-Dame. One made with 4,383 Lego pieces.
Lego, the world’s largest toy company, on Saturday released a model of the Notre-Dame Cathedral, complete with rose windows, bell towers and a central spire surrounded by statues. The set, designed for adults, will be part of the company’s collection of sets based on architectural feats, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and its Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“I just want to have this beautiful thing in my house,” Gaudillat, 25, said of the Notre-Dame set. He started building complex Lego sets a few years ago and was hooked.
The Danish toy company is best known for its colorful games for children, including its best-selling animal, train, and Harry Potter-themed sets. But since 2020, when Lego started a new category of toys marketed to people over 18, the company has doubled the size of its range aimed at adults. About 20 percent of the company’s sets on sale are aimed at adult Lego fans, known as AFOLs.
The Notre-Dame set, which sells for $229.99, is gaining attention for its design and because it is the first religious structure the company has released in 67 years, according to Lego’s official historian.
Thomas Lajon, a screenwriter and director in Paris, said he wanted to buy the Lego Notre-Dame because of how important the real cathedral, a jewel of medieval Gothic architecture, is to him.
“It’s a time to reconnect with the cathedral by going there or rebuilding it with Lego bricks,” said Lajon, 28, who designed the Orient Express Lego model through a company program that solicits design concepts from fans.
Construction of the (royal) Notre-Dame Cathedral began in 1163, during the reign of King Louis VII, and was completed in 1345. During the French Revolution in the 1790s, a mob beheaded statues of kings in Notre-Dame , and the cathedral fell into disrepair.
Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” highlighted the condition of the cathedral and prompted its renovation, which took place between 1844 and 1864. Architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc designed and added a spire.
Genevieve Capa Cruz, head of adult product for the Lego Group, said in an interview that the company’s adult Lego fan base had grown in recent years, particularly among what she described as adults with high-pressure jobs who see building Legos as a way to relax.
The company is trying to reframe Lego play as “a legitimate leisure activity” for adults, he said. “The same way you would invest time and money into making ceramic bowls.”
Themes that resonate with adults include architecture, flowers and movies, such as “The Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars,” he said. Adult Lego fans are important to the company not only because its sets are more expensive (the Star Wars Millennium Falcon model costs $850) but because they also tend to buy Lego gifts for children, she said.
Lego reported a 4 percent increase in sales last year, even as other toy companies such as Mattel and Hasbro saw a decline. Against that backdrop, Lego plans to open at least 100 more stores in the next 10 months, Chief Executive Niels B. Christiansen said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
Sonia Hudson, an intensive care doctor at a hospital outside London, said she plans to buy two of the Notre-Dame Lego sets. She will build one to display in her living room and buy the other for her bricks, to add to her collection of approximately 500,000, which she uses to create her own designs.
“I don’t see Lego as a toy,” said Dr. Hudson, 50. “I see it as a means of construction. “I could build with wood, I could build with clay, but if I make a mistake I would have to start over.”
Rok Zgalin Kobe, the Lego designer who created the Notre-Dame set, said he designed the cathedral so that users would have to build it in the same stages as the actual cathedral was built, rather than from the bottom up. , following almost 900 years of history.
“Once you complete it, you can look out the front door,” he said. “You get the feeling of space, the feeling of majesty that accompanies it.”
The set design process involved experimentation, requiring daily trips to a room inside the company’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, which contains versions of all the Lego bricks available to create new projects.
Like Hudson, the doctor who uses Legos to relax, Gordon Finlay, 62, picked up Legos again after not playing with them for a long period. He and other Lego fans refer to that period, between the time when people stop playing with Legos as children and when they rediscover them as adults, as “the dark ages.”
Finlay, who lives on the outskirts of Glasgow, said he plans to build Lego Notre-Dame next month, just before 15 million tourists are expected to visit Paris for the Olympic Games.