In our first episode of 2024 we sat down with LEGO Master Builder, Richard Paules, to get an in-depth look at the process behind the building of LEGO Dulles!
In this episode we get to know DC local, and LEGO Master Builder, Richard Paules. He tells all about his interest in LEGO from a young age, and what inspired him to start building large pieces like the White House and our very own Dulles Airport.
Follow Richard on Instagram at @dclegoman
Have questions for us? We'd love to hear from you! Send us an email at info@thecapitalrunway.com
For more information, please visit our website at https://thecapitalrunway.com.
Staff:
Tanisha Lewis, VP of DISI
Jaimini Erskine, VP of Marketing & Concessions
Charles Wilson, Co-host/Co-producer
Amanda Ohbayashi, Co-host/Co-producer/Social media producer
Ryan Burdick, Editor/Co-producer
Bong Lee, Graphics
Brian McCoy, Digital Strategy/Co-producer
Sagia Depty, Marketing Lead/Co-producer
Adam Lawrence, Web producer
[00:00:04] Amanda: I'm Amanda.
[00:00:05] Charles: I'm Charles.
[00:00:06] Amanda: This is the Capital Runway Podcast.
[00:00:09] Charles: Hey, Amanda, how's it going?
[00:00:12] Amanda: How's it going, Charles? I'm doing great. How are you?
[00:00:14] Charles: Hey, it's February. It's Black History Month.
[00:00:16] Amanda: Happy Black History Month.
[00:00:18] Charles: We are wrapping up Black History Month. We had a lot of exciting events and activities this month that we're really proud of. We had a video featuring employees and passengers talking about if they can jump on an airplane today to go see their favorite African-American music performing artists, who would that be and why.
[00:00:36] Amanda: Yes, I saw.
[00:00:37] Charles: Those videos are on our website now.
[00:00:39] Amanda: Yes, we posted on social, too.
[00:00:41] Charles: Yes. We had several employees. I think it was 60 employees, their friends and family had a private tour at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
[00:00:52] Amanda: Wow.
[00:00:53] Charles: Yes, it was a great turnout. They took a lot of great pictures and a lot of great feedback.
[00:00:57] Amanda: Yes, that's a great museum. It's one of my favorites. Who would you go see?
[00:01:01] Charles: If I can hop on a plane today, [unintelligible 00:01:05]
[00:01:06] Amanda: Oh.
[00:01:07] Charles: Yes. I saw her in New Jersey several years ago on her last tour, and it was great. I would love to go overseas to experience her and the music overseas. That would be great.
[00:01:21] Amanda: What about you? Yes. My pick is definitely Beyonce. The queen. Yes. Of course, I would love to.
[00:01:25] Charles: Are you part of the Beehive?
[00:01:27] Amanda: Absolutely. Who's not? I saw her. I had the privilege of seeing her and Jay-Z several years ago when they were on tour together, and that was so fun.
[00:01:35] Charles: Great. Great. Who are we talking to today?
[00:01:38] Amanda: Today, we are talking to Lego Master Builder Richard Paules. He is the designer of the Lego Dulles piece of art that we now have in our airport.
[00:01:53] Charles: Yes. I walked by the other day. It's pretty cool.
[00:01:55] Amanda: It's amazing.
[00:01:56] Charles: Yes. Yes. I was like, wow. He put that much detail.
[00:02:00] Amanda: I know. So much detail. Yes. Even from like the swoop of the roof. To the water drain systems inside. Immaculate
[00:02:09] Charles: Yes. I can't wait to hear how he put all that together.
[00:02:12] Amanda: Today, Charles, we have a super exciting guest, man of the hour, Richard Paules, our local Lego Master Builder celebrity. He is actually the designer and builder of our Lego Dulles set that we now have on display upstairs. Welcome, Richard.
[00:02:34] Richard Paules: Thank you so much for having me on.
[00:02:36] Amanda: Yes. Why don't you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself?
[00:02:40] Richard: I'm 35 years old. I'm from the Washington, D.C. area. I was born in D.C., lived here my entire life.
[00:02:49] Amanda: You've been flying out of Dulles for a while.
[00:02:52] Richard: Dulles was the very first airport I ever flew out of when I was 12 years old. It was an international flight, too. I was so fortunate. I flew to London out of Dulles.
[00:03:02] Amanda: On the BA flight?
[00:03:03] Richard: Yes. On the BA flight. As my first flight, I was very fortunate.
[00:03:07] Amanda: Yes. Let's talk a little bit about LEGOs and how you got into Lego building. Is it something you've always done? Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:03:18] Richard: I was super into Lego as a kid. I was one of those kids who had his dad build him a giant plywood table, and I had a whole city and trains and mixed different toys. There were always G.I. Joes mixed in with the LEGOs. I fell off from it as I grew up. When I went off to school, I gave all my LEGOs very generously to my nieces and nephews.
Then one day, about seven years ago, I came home, and my aunt had delivered all of my childhood LEGOs back to me, and they were just in my living room in boxes. I thought, well, what am I going to do with all this now? I started, inevitably, opened up the boxes and started tinkering and playing around with them and fell back in love with Lego all over again.
[00:04:06] Charles: How did you figure out like, "You know what, I'm pretty good at this"?
[00:04:10] Richard: I thought I was pretty good as a kid, but as an adult and with adult resources and knowledge, I discovered that I was really good at this, that I really had a knack for, I could look at a building and figure out exactly how to recreate it in Lego blocks.
[00:04:28] Amanda: We've talked about being local to D.C. and your love of Lego. What inspired you to want to build Dulles in Lego form?
[00:04:37] Richard: I have always been, ever since my first flight, I was always inspired by Dulles. I had done so many Lego models that were classical buildings around D.C. I had done the Capitol, and I had done, I did a huge White House with the full interior. I had done the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry on 16th Street for the Masons. I had done the Kennedy Center for the Kennedy Center.
[00:05:00] Amanda: These were commissioned pieces?
[00:05:01] Richard: These were commissioned pieces, yes. The Kennedy Center and the Scottish Rite were both commissions. I had never done anything quite like Dulles. I knew for my next project, I wanted to do something that was modern, a modernist piece, and I wanted to do something really different that was a challenge. There's nothing quite like Dulles. There is no other modernist structure probably in the world that is quite like Dulles.
[00:05:25] Amanda: We like to hear that.
[00:05:27] Richard: I'm sure it's exciting to work in such an iconic piece of American architecture.
[00:05:34] Charles: What do kids say about your work? When they see it, what do they say?
[00:05:38] Richard: I'm not sure who is more impressed, kids or adults. Who is a kid anymore?
[00:05:43] Amanda: Right? We're all children at heart.
[00:05:47] Richard: Kids especially are just so amazed about what you can do with the things that they themselves have at home. They have the same blocks that I have, they have the same pieces. They have the same ability to do absolutely anything with Lego because it's so versatile. One of my favorite statistics about Lego is that with just two by six standard bricks, there are over 900 million combinations of ways that you could take those just six bricks and work them. 900 million. They actually had to use advanced computers to calculate it. You add a seventh brick and it goes up exponentially.
[00:06:27] Amanda: That's fascinating. What's the process like when you decide you want to build something? You've picked Dulles and now what does that process look like for you in getting everything you need from idea to finished product?
[00:06:43] Richard: What I usually do is I start with a storyboard. I will go online and pick about two dozen photos from different angles, interior, exterior, and make a storyboard. Then I will try to figure out proportion. All architecture and design is proportions. If the proportions aren't right, it's not going to look right. It's not going to have that feel of an authentic model. I want it to look as little like Lego as possible. I want it to look as authentic, like it was molded out of a single piece, not assembled from tens of thousands of little ones.
Sort of my process is for Dulles, for instance, I started actually before the base, before anything else. I started with the columns. I started with a single column and trying to nail down the exact proportion, the height, that distinct horse head curvature. I built all the columns first. Then I went back and started from the base up once I had the spacing and proportions.
[00:07:48] Amanda: How did you manage to get the curve of the roof? It seems very difficult to have Lego pieces curve.
[00:07:56] Richard: Lego is amazingly versatile. If you overlap, and this is a trick, everyone, if you overlap in a tapestry pattern the same pieces over and over again, or use round ones to offset in between, you can-- Lego has amazing versatility, amazing flexibility, and you can bend. I've done whole towers, whole route. You can make a ring out of Legos under high tension by overlapping, say, one by two plates or one by one bricks over and over. That's all that the roof of Dulles is, is a tapestry of-- There's only three bricks, three size pieces in the entire roof, and it's just those repeated over and over again.
[00:08:42] Charles: From start to finish, how long did the process take you?
[00:08:47] Richard: Took me about six months. Not six months of continuous work, but after work and spare time. Usually like two or three hours at a time. Usually beyond two or three hours, you start to go cross-eyed.
[00:09:02] Charles: You do this in your spare time?
[00:09:03] Richard: Yes.
[00:09:05] Charles: What do you do for your day job?
[00:09:07] Richard: I actually have a landscaping and construction company.
[00:09:11] Amanda: Is there like an engineering aspect to that, too, that you pulled from to apply to Lego, or one way or the other?
[00:09:18] Richard: Oh, absolutely. There's a ton of engineering principles that go into Lego building. Lego operates under the same principles of cantilevers and tension and arches and compression and angles.
[00:09:37] Charles: You make it sound so easy.
[00:09:38] Amanda: I know.
[00:09:39] Charles: Were there any challenges that you came across when constructing the model?
[00:09:46] Richard: Probably the biggest challenge was the roof. Because the roof only touches the columns in such small areas that it's almost floating around the columns rather than actually attached to them. I wanted to capture that effect in the Lego. There's very, it's a very small surface area that's actually connected to anything. I wasn't sure if the weight of the roof was going to support itself and the columns, if it was all just going to pull down and collapse. I wasn't sure if it was going to work. It's a testament to Saarinen's design and principles that it all works in perfect balance, that the angle, the columns angled outward and the roof pulls down on them and locks everything together.
[00:10:40] Amanda: Yes. How many pieces ended up going into it?
[00:10:43] Richard: I didn't count them as I went, but just using some quick extrapolation, I would say probably between 50 and 60,000.
[00:10:54] Charles: How much does your building weigh?
[00:10:58] Richard: It took six friends to lift it out of my basement and had to tilt at about a 30 degree angle to get, because I never, I didn't plan on all this happening and it ever having to leave my basement. I would probably say it weighs 120 pounds.
[00:11:19] Charles: Yes. How did you feel when you completed the project?
[00:11:24] Richard: Honestly, whenever I complete a project and it turns out as well as Dulles, I really do have a exhilarating feeling of satisfaction. I'm like, I just scored a goal of, I honestly, it's probably the dorkiest thing about me, but I really do feel like I just nailed it.
[00:11:42] Charles: Yes, do you run around the basement like to scream?
[00:11:45] Amanda: With the little space there was after you have this massive thing?
[00:11:49] Richard: Quietly, I keep it all inside.
[00:11:53] Amanda: What's your experience like in the local Lego store?
[00:11:56] Richard: I happened to pop in the other day when I was at Tyson's into the Tyson's Lego store and my partner ratted me out that I was the one who was building Dulles when they asked me what the pieces I was buying were for. I was immediately swarmed by every staff member at the Lego store who had seen Dulles already and were all aware of it and could not have been more enthusiastic and wanted to pick my brain and wanted to know more.
[00:12:31] Amanda: That's so fun, local celebrity, I love it. How many trips did it take to the Lego store to purchase all of the pieces? Were you ordering them online? How does that work?
[00:12:42] Richard: A mixture of, I had a lot of them already in my Lego collection, which I love that the pieces that went into Dulles were also pieces that went into the White House, that went into Westminster Abbey, that went into Venice.
[00:12:58] Amanda: Yes, that's cool.
[00:12:59] Richard: The same pieces made 20 different things over the years that I've built. Also, trips to the Lego store and also online. There's an online marketplace called BrickLink. That's like an eBay for Lego that you can just, it's an indispensable resource because you can, if I need a one by two, I can punch in white one by two and it'll tell you how many are out there and who you can buy from and what the price is.
[00:13:24] Amanda: Black market of Lego or all above board?
[00:13:29] Charles: Did I hear you right that some of these pieces came from other projects? Does that mean that the White House model that you put together no longer exists?
[00:13:39] Richard: Sadly, yes, the White House model no longer exists. Just pictures and video. Unfortunately, I'm a man of limited resources. If I had infinite resources, I would certainly keep everything I build. I'm so honored that Dulles decided to purchase this one for me, because it gets to live forever.
[00:14:00] Amanda: Absolutely, we were not going to let that get away from us. What's your hope? What do you hope that people take away when they come see Lego Dulles?
[00:14:09] Richard: I hope they're inspired both by the actual building, and I hope they're inspired to just think about design and art and architecture, the architecture that's all around them more. Maybe if they're rushing through Dulles to catch a flight, they may have never really stopped to appreciate the soaring canopy over their head or the thought that went into designing the world's first airport for jet aircraft. Most people that I tell that to are shocked by that and don't know that. Every airport before Dulles was an older airport, was something that was being modified for the changing age of jet travel.
I hope they come to appreciate the incredible architecture that's around, the way the columns of Dulles mimic the columns of the great buildings, the monumental architecture of D.C. not far away.
[00:15:01] Charles: You got any advice for anybody who looks at your work and says, you know what, I want to do that?
[00:15:06] Richard: I want those people to know that absolutely anyone can do this. I think that's the magic of Lego. Both of my grandfathers were model builders and tinkerers and carpenters. They built models, balsa wood models of things. They had a huge workshop with thousands of dollars worth of tools and glue and saws and paint. That's a huge undertaking. You can go out and buy loose bricks or a set and you can have a model in your own home and you can become a model builder. One thing I would also like to say is that not everything always goes smoothly.
[00:15:44] Amanda: Any fails to mention?
[00:15:45] Richard: I'd say the biggest thing I would never hesitate to admit when you've made a mistake or when something isn't working and go back. I've done that tragically often to realize that something just isn't working, and to break it down and go back to the beginning and start over. Sometimes that's what's necessary.
[00:16:05] Amanda: That's a metaphor for life.
[00:16:09] Richard: You can always go back.
[00:16:10] Amanda: You can always go back. You have to go, you get to page 63, you realize something has gone wrong. You got to go back and take everything apart. I've done that a couple of times.
[00:16:20] Charles: We ask all our guests, do you have any parting words for our listeners?
[00:16:26] Richard: I really like to say, never stop thinking about the built environment around you. Never stop observing and thinking about the way the architecture relates to you, how it makes you feel, how it inspires you, yes.
[00:16:40] Amanda: Then our last question, which we like to ask all of our guests, where are you flying to next?
[00:16:46] Richard: Actually, we'll be flying at the end of March on Air France to Berlin, which is one of my favorite cities.
[00:16:53] Amanda: Awesome, that'll be fun. Where can people find you?
[00:16:57] Richard: My Instagram used to be RWPCreations, but I changed it to DCLEGOMAN. If you're a new follower, you can find me there and you can follow me at my new website, DCLEGOMAN.com.
[00:17:09] Amanda: Great, awesome. Thank you so much for being here. We are thrilled to see this Lego model in our airport, and thank you for everything.
[00:17:17] Richard: Thank you so much for having me on.
[00:17:19] Charles: Thank you. That was a great conversation.
[00:17:24] Amanda: It was fascinating.
[00:17:25] Charles: To see like that, how he started, his interest in this started as a kid and now he's doing it professionally per se. It's an exciting story.
[00:17:36] Amanda: Yes, as we talked about earlier, just the level of detail that he put into everything and how he came up with the design elements of it, I think was really fascinating and how the Lego stacking works.
[00:17:52] Charles: Yes, it's much better than any Lego model I've ever put together.
[00:17:56] Amanda: Oh, for sure. My nephew is a Lego enthusiast, but I have helped him a few times and that's, I get to page 35, I'm lost. Where have I gone wrong?
[00:18:08] Charles: I always look forward to the questions and comments we get from our listeners. How can they get in touch with us to give us some feedback?
[00:18:17] Amanda: You can email us at info@thecapitalrunway.com.
[00:18:24] Charles: Thank you guys for listening.
[00:18:32] [END OF AUDIO]