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Our summer field trip was to the National Building Museum in D.C. The building has compelling architecture and galleries with blueprints, city models, and brick stacking. It also has a unique gift shop with unusual items scattered about.

The museum is interesting, but the primary reason for our visit was to take Gabe to see some legos built to a grand scale. In the gallery, a Chicago architect had constructed with legos fifteen buildings from around the world.

Many of the buildings are from Chicago, and it was fun to show the kids the John Hancock Building that my Dad, an iron worker, helped build. We also saw the Marina Towers that Dad told me Russ (our adopted grandfather) had worked on.

The St. Louis Arch was a bit smaller than the real one the kids had seen earlier in the summer, but it was fun to look at and consider how difficult it would be to build it from legos.

The Empire State Building was there, along with one of the Twin Towers, the Trans America Pyramid, and the Sears Tower. One house was fully built: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, and the White House was under construction. The lego architect returns periodically throughout the days of  the exhibit to work on the White House and he is supposed to complete it by the end of the show.

After looking at the buildings, we arrived in the section where everyone can use legos to build something for display. The kids loved this part and stayed busy working on their creations until the museum workers shooed us away.