Incredible Roman Colosseum Built With 200,000 LEGO Bricks

Yesterday was an exciting time in Asia’s history, well, if you are a LEGO fan that is. The first LEGOLAND opened in Malaysia. Among other things, it has 40 rides made from more than 50 million LEGO bricks! The coordinating 249-room LEGOLAND hotel will open in 2014. Everything in the hotel will be LEGO-inspired (even the french fries in the restarant, check these out on flickr). One of our guest authors, Mark, brought all this to my attention, and you can read more about it on CNNGo. I’m always looking for any excuse to celebrate LEGO, so to raise a glass to all those in Malaysia who now have their own LEGOLAND, I thought I’d write about another LEGO masterpiece. For this occasion, I’ve chosen the LEGO Roman Colosseum by Ryan McNaught.

Ryan used over 200,000 LEGO bricks to construct this monstrosity of a build. Half of the Roman Colosseum reflects what it looks like today and the other half looks like it did when it was originally built in 80 AD. According to him, the most difficult part was creating something oval-shaped out of square bricks. The curved part was the first thing I noticed when I looked at this.

This is a fantastic piece of Lego architecture with some Roman Colosseum history sprinkled into the mix. Ryan built this for the University of Sydney, and it will be displayed at the Nicholson Museum in Melbourne until January. Many sites are reporting that this is the first Roman Colosseum ever created out of LEGO, but from what I’ve seen, that is not entirely true. On Brothers-Brick, there is a Microscale Colosseum that was built in 2009 based on yet another larger version. Of course, it’s nothing like what Ryan put together, but that LEGO builder also figured out how to make an oval LEGO structure from square bricks. You can read more about Ryan’s incredible Roman Colosseum over on Gizmodo. Thank you, Brent, for showing this to me!