Buildings get knocked down all the time in Denver. But Brian Robey's favorite part of the city's skyline remains.
As a high school kid, Robey was drawn to Greenwood Village’s Plaza Tower One skyscraper — one of the tallest buildings in the Denver Tech Center that once housed Chevron. He particularly enjoys how the glass exterior often reflects Denver’s blue skies.
He loves the building so much that he spent several months and a couple hundred dollars to make a Lego replica without so much as an instruction manual — an effort that eventually got noticed by the building’s management.
“It's something I've always wanted to try and build, but it's been kind of a challenge to figure out the best way to build it because of the curved elements in it,” Robey said.
Robey, who works as a family pastor for Highline Community Church, has always loved playing with Legos, but his passion for the hobby changed when the pandemic started.
“I still had bins of old Legos, so I was like, ‘Hey, I might as well just build something, I'm bored,’” he said. “So I just started building stuff and then kind of realized it was helpful for just decompressing and processing anxiety.”
For Robey, being an adult Lego fan is far more liberating than being confined to your parents’ permission and budget as a child. He’s building more than classic pirate sets of old — now he’s building epic 6,000-piece Lord of the Rings sets with his kids, tensegrity structures, and discontinued Lego sets he yearned after as a kid that are now worth hundreds of dollars.
Legos also scratches an itch of a career he never seriously pursued: Robey originally wanted to be an architect, but dropped the idea after taking a class in high school.
“I hated every minute of it,” Robey said. “It was like, ‘Your line's too thick’ and ‘Oh, this needs to be three sixteenths of an inch more to the left.’ Just the detail of it was just not my thing.”
Lately, he’s been challenging himself by making replicas of real-world buildings without an instruction guide. Robey first started with the Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado Springs, a building with a unique, angular shape.
“Real life builds are a little bit harder because there's something to point to next to it that's like, it has to look like this,” he said. “The Air Force Academy one was probably one of the hardest things to do with that because there's so much really challenging architecture in that build. And if you set it next to it and it doesn't look like the Air Force Academy Chapel, then everyone's going to be like, what's that? Is that just some pointy building?”
It took some trial and error, but Robey got that build to a level he was happy with. With the experience of the Air Force Academy chapel under his belt, he started formulating a plan to take on his beloved Plaza Tower One building.
“I started planning it in December and then started building some of the prototypes and then kind of figuring out how many bricks I need and then ordering them and then waiting for all of them to show up,” Robey said. “So that's sort of the biggest process. And then once you have 'em all, then trying different things with them to see what will actually work.”
Unlike many other amateur Lego creators, Robey doesn’t use computer-aided design software to plan out builds beforehand.
He savors the challenge of freehanding it and solving problems as they crop up. For the Plaza Tower One building project, he often had to start over and rebuild from scratch after encountering a problem.
After he finished the build, Robey took a photo of his replica in front of the Plaza Tower One building itself and shared it with several Lego groups he’s part of on Facebook. The photo eventually made its way to the building’s property manager, and now, Robey is talking with them to potentially install the Lego replica temporarily in its lobby.
Robey said he doesn’t normally keep his custom Lego creations intact after finishing — he just doesn’t have the space for them. And while he hasn’t settled on his next project, people are already giving him ideas.
“A lot of people on Facebook are telling me I need to do the Cash Register building, the Wells Fargo building. I think that's probably the most iconic piece of architecture in Denver. If you took that out, it could just look like any city.” he said. “And then who knows what I'd do after that.”
