Sean Kenney is a professional LEGO artist who has been building for over 30 years. He’s been a cartoonist, a graphic artist and an interactive designer, but as a LEGO Certified Professional, he gets to do what he really loves for a living. He calls himself a “professional kid,” and has over a million bricks in his New York studio!
Gordon is a 12-year-old kid who spent nearly 3 years working with Sean to build his dream LEGO model. Here’s what he has to say about himself and being a member of the LEGO Club:
“I’ve been building LEGO sets for seven years, and I really enjoy building them. I was 4 when I was introduced to LEGO sets, and I haven’t stopped building since then. I have been in the LEGO Club for four years. When it’s time for the magazine to arrive, I can’t wait to get home to check the mail. I really enjoy all the news articles and interviews. I also enjoy Cool Creations!”
Sean and Gordon, you’ve built one amazing model! How did you decide to make Yankee Stadium?
Sean: Gordon is a huge fan of two things: the New York Yankees, and LEGO. It was the perfect choice! Yankee Stadium is a big piece of New York history and American baseball history. It’s an icon that housed many famous baseball players, like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra and Lou Gehrig. But now the Yankees have moved to a new stadium, and it’s sad to lose the original! Perhaps his LEGO model will help everyone remember “the house that Ruth built.”
Gordon: I am a very passionate baseball fan, and as you can see, I like the Yankees. The LEGO Yankee Stadium is not just a project – it’s part of my life, because I have been working on it for so long.
How did you design and create the stadium model?
Sean: We began this project in early 2006. We started by using a mapping website to get a satellite photo of the stadium. We printed it out, took lots of measurements, and drew a “blueprint” onto graph paper. Then we collected hundreds of photos of the stadium by searching online photo websites. When we started building, we used the photos as a visual guide and the blueprints as a mathematical guide.
A lot of the details, like windows, entryways and signs, were built just by looking at photos and coming up with a good way to build them with LEGO bricks. But lots of other areas needed to be perfectly to scale (like the size of the infield, or the angle of the grandstands), so we drew out lots of designs on graph paper until we had something that looked good and fit properly.
For really important details, like the famous façade or the elevated train that runs outside the stadium, we often built many different versions and placed them onto the model to compare how they would look.
Gordon: The thing I have learned the most from building this model is that some designs are hard to build in bricks. But I also learned to keep working, keep building, keep experimenting until I got the solution. Some of my best ideas came from experimentation.
What was it like to build Yankee Stadium together?
Gordon: It was very fun to work on a big project with Sean. I built the entire stadium from home plate, down the right field foul line and across to center field. I also built many of the ads that ring the outfield wall. Some parts of the building process were fun, which made them seem very easy, but some required hard work and patience, including rebuilding parts where my designs didn’t work the first time.
Sean: Gordon did a great job throughout the project. From the very beginning, he was involved in everything from finding reference photos, sketching on graph paper and building prototypes, all the way through to the actual design and construction of the sculpture. At first, I was more like a teacher, helping Gordon understand scale, design, and simple physics and architecture. But as he became more skilled, he was able to work on his own and complete entire sections of the stadium without my assistance. We ended up collaborating on design, and he came up with some really great ideas. This project has been a lot of fun!
How big is your completed model?
Sean: The stadium is built to a scale of 1:150 from over 47,000 LEGO bricks. That means that every 1 inch in the model represents 150 inches (12.5 feet) in the real stadium. The model is about 5 feet wide and 5 feet long. We were going to make it smaller (about 3 feet), but we decided that a much bigger stadium would look great and much more impressive! The scale of the model is so small that we had to create tiny little versions of everything. People are just little 1x1 LEGO bricks with a flat round plate for a head. A lot of people ask, “Why didn’t you make the stadium so that it could fit minifigures?” The answer is easy: it would have been 27 times larger and taken us 80 years to build it!
How long did it take you to make?
Sean: We worked on it for almost 3 years. We began in February 2006, working whenever Gordon had available time. We worked around his schedule, so we usually only got a few hours done per week. The project took over 340 hours spread across nearly 100 building sessions.
What are some of your favorite details of the stadium?
Sean: Monument Park includes placards and monuments to famous Yankees players, just like in the real stadium. There are little details all over the place, like 1-inch-tall trees, turnstiles at the ticket booths, loading dock doors, air conditioners on the roofs, even a squirrel climbing the foul pole!
Gordon: If you look inside one of the sections, we have a manager’s office with a throne, fireplace and contracts. Outside, you can see the subway train station, tracks and even a scale subway car. The ads along the back are another of my favorite parts. They look like real ads. We even put a LEGO ad in, just for the fun of it.
Did you use any special building tricks?
Sean: Most of the model was built in the standard way. All the bricks line up on the “LEGO grid” and make for a really sturdy structure. The stadium has a lot of curved walls, which are made by stepping bricks slowly across large areas to give the illusion of a curve, just like when I create giant sculptures of people or faces. We used hinges in a few places to make some important angled areas.
Sometimes you can turn LEGO plates sideways to get the thin side of the plate to make a thin line, when you need to add really little details. We did this for the foul lines, which run on strange angles outward from home plate. They look really great, and there’s no cheating…they’re attached using Technic pins and have tiles on the top so they line up perfectly with the other LEGO bricks. We used the same technique outside the stadium to make the lines and crosswalks on the streets.
Gordon: I think the scoreboard in center field is so cool because we used black and yellow “lightsaber” pieces placed sideways to form dots and create words. We were able to spell things, and we used pieces in a special way.
Do you have any tips to share with the LEGO Club members reading this?
Sean: You don’t need to have a million LEGO bricks to create great models! It’s easy to look at a big model like this and think, “I could never do that,” but guess what? You can! All you need is an idea and the patience to think up a great design for what you want to build. Take a look at the little trains we have running past the stadium – each train car has less than 30 pieces, so it’s easy to build and still looks really cool. Also, unless you’re building something imaginary, try taking a photo and setting it down next to where you build your LEGO models. You’d be surprised what details you forget when you’re only working from memory!
Any last thoughts?
Gordon: I have mixed feelings now that this project is over. I have finished a 3-year project and I’m thrilled, but I’m sad not to be working on Yankee Stadium every weekend.
Thanks, Gordon and Sean – and keep on building!
Click here to see photos!