Case Study
Decades after Legoland was sold off to Merlin Entertainment, LEGO set out to reclaim the story of the brick by building a new attraction in Billund, the small Danish town where the company was founded. Bjarke Ingels would design the 12,000 square meter building. The grandson of the founder would oversee the project personally. RAA was brought in to shape what went inside.
The brief was a dream and a trap in equal measure: craft an experience worthy of one of the most beloved brands on earth, for a fanbase that knows every product, every set, every limited edition, and is paying close attention.
Before any structure, a lot of listening. We embedded inside LEGO, meeting with people from product, marketing, archives, events, education, and the LEGO Learning Institute. We read the company's own research on child development. We played with the bricks ourselves, prototyping activities on tables the way kids would on floors, looking for what was universal.
The work was messy on purpose. It had to be, because the question we were trying to answer was not what LEGO is, but what LEGO does to you when you sit down with it.
Concept sprint at RAA, New York
The first question was structural. How should content in the building be organized? Chronologically, walking visitors through the company's history? By product line, giving each theme its own zone? By complexity, from Duplo to Technic? Each had defenders inside LEGO, and each had problems.
The answer came not from the bricks but from what children do with them. A framework built around the how of play would scale across product lines, survive the company's next fifty years, and sit cleanly inside the brand.
We landed on three thematic zones, each named for a fundamental mode of play: Stories, Sciences, Expressions. Narrative play. Systems play. Creative play. Every activity in the building would live in one of the three.
A project at this scale, with this many stakeholders, needed a single source of truth. The Activity Matrix was both deliverable and process tool. It catalogued every activity the team could imagine and held each one to the same set of questions. Passive or active? Individual or group? What age group? Does it need staff? What's the expected dwell time? Is there wow factor?
The spreadsheet let fabricators estimate costs, operations plan staffing, and business planners weigh tradeoffs with something other than taste. It became the concept phase's thirty-thousand-foot view, and the document everyone reached for when a decision needed to be made.
The Activity Matrix during concept phase
Learning through play is core to LEGO's values, and the building was expected to carry that weight. Like the brick itself, the LEGO House needed to be stripped of anything gratuitous.
To assess educational value objectively, we extended the matrix. Each activity was scored one through four across thirteen developmental criteria, a methodology built with the LEGO Learning Institute and rooted in Piaget. Scores rendered as dots sized by value, which turned the spreadsheet into a heat map of developmental potential. At a glance, you could see which activities built collaboration, which built gross motor skills, which built problem-solving, and where the gaps were.
Developmental value, scored and visualized across four zones
The Activity Matrix became the content source for building programming. Which activities need a double-height space? Which belong in a dark corner? How many fit in a given volume? When we overlaid the matrix on BIG's architectural drawings, we got content maps that worked narrative against architecture and visitor flow.
The building came to life in the overlap. Spatial constraints sharpened the content. The content gave the architecture its reason.
Activities mapped onto BIG's plan, color-coded by zone
The LEGO House opened in September 2017. It is now the top-rated attraction in Billund and one of the most visited cultural destinations in Denmark.
Where to start? A magical visit, so good that we went twice.
— Visitor review, United Kingdom
I've never seen so many genuinely happy adults in one place.
— Visitor review, Germany