Richard Paules sees the same Washington as the rest of us. He just doesn’t see it in the same way. He looks at the imposing Capitol, the distinguished White House, the elegant Kennedy Center and thinks, I could build that.
And so he has.
“There’s a thing called Lego brain where you sort of see the world in Lego,” said Paules, 35, as he was putting the finishing touches on a replica of a Dupont Circle mansion he created with the iconic plastic toy pieces in his basement apartment in Petworth. “You come to observe the shapes and geometry within a structure and translate that into Lego elements.”
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In this small space that doubles as his studio, he has put that Lego brain to work, standing at a worktable for hours at a time recreating the Washington region’s distinctive landmarks while listening to Chopin or Debussy. The outside world disappears. Stress melts away. He works without directions or a plan. Lego brain takes over as he looks at photos or drawings of the structure he wants to build and then free-forms it into existence.
Click by satisfying click, Paules snaps together the building blocks of childhood into stunning Lego doppelgängers that seem to defy their composite material. Thousands of small, hard, unforgiving shapes are forged to form creations of almost unfathomable precision and exquisite beauty.
There are no shortcuts. There are no custom-made building blocks. He relies on the approximately 100,000 standard Lego pieces he keeps organized in nearby bins. Some are from sets he has made and dismantled. Others he purchased in bulk from Lego or websites for builders. His favorite pieces include versatile jumper plates and grill pieces for their fine lines.
The building process is exacting and exhausting. “After three hours, you start to go cross-eyed,” Paules said. Each piece must interlock with another. No pieces can be carved or otherwise altered. That would be cheating.
“I think the highest compliment I’m ever paid is when people look at some of my work and don’t know that it’s Lego until they get really up close to it,” he said.
Occasionally Paules has gotten well into a project and realized he made an early mistake. That means taking the building apart and starting over, a painful but necessary step. “I think the most difficult thing about these projects is getting scale and proportion right,” Paules said. “Because if the scale isn’t right, it’s just not going to look right. It’s not going to look authentic.”
Last year, Paules spent the better part of six months putting together about 50,000 Lego pieces to form a replica of Dulles Airport’s iconic passenger terminal, designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen in 1958.
Paules’s version — four feet wide, eight feet long and four feet tall — is a near-perfect re-creation of the soaring original. Bright and airy, it includes Lego versions of a control tower, customers standing at ticket counters, planes on the tarmac and, of course, Dulles’s Space Age-y people movers that transport passengers from the terminal to planes. (In fairness, the people movers have always looked more like Lego creations than real-life vehicles.)
Getting Lego Dulles out of his basement required another precision operation. After Paules removed the control tower, five friends helped him carry the completed project and turn it 45 degrees to negotiate a narrow hallway. Then Paules took a reciprocating saw to an outdoor metal railing to allow for an easier exit. Good thing he owns his house.
The Dulles project began as many of Paules’s do: He built it for his own enjoyment. His replicas of Washington landmarks are in some ways love letters to the city of his birth, which he returned to 12 years ago. “There really is no city quite like it in America,” he said. “Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been awed by the grandeur of D.C. and its plan and its perspective.”
As the first airport he ever flew from, Dulles held special meaning too. Building it would be a challenge, but with each project, Paules has tried to outdo his previous creations. He had already tackled D.C.’s most famous structures, as well as replicas of Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany and San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower.
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Paules has sold some of his works, but typically once he’s done, he simply takes them apart, sorting the pieces back into bins to be available for the next project. “I don’t know what I would do with them, and I’m not a man of infinite resources,” said Paules, who admits he’s not terribly sentimental when it comes time to break apart a creation.
A dispassionate disassembling might have been the fate for his Dulles creation, but a social media post about it caught the eye of a Dulles employee, who alerted managers. Within days, the airport asked Paules if it could pay to acquire its Lego mini-me. Paules was happy to oblige. He said the airport paid him about $10,000 for the piece, roughly the same amount he received when he built a replica for the Kennedy Center a few years ago.
Last month, Dulles installed Paules’s creation in its terminal, and visitors have been gawking at it ever since, said Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority vice president and Dulles Airport manager Richard Golinowski. “And it’s not even just travelers,” he said. “People have been visiting Dulles just to see it.” When he first heard about the Lego version of the airport, Golinowski imagined a small replica. When he realized how big it actually was, he was blown away.
“Phenomenal,” Golinowski said. “It goes back to the size of it and how immense it is and the details of all the different levels in the terminal and on the roadway and our mobile lounges and the tower. It’s just a great piece, and it really exemplifies Dulles Airport and the uniqueness of the architecture at Dulles.”
Like many other kids around the world, Paules played with Legos as a child. As a teenager, he began working on more complicated structures. He would buy a set, build it and then take it apart to build something new, something his own. He credits his parents and his grandfathers, both of whom were skilled carpenters, with encouraging him to build and experiment.
But at 18, Paules gave up his childhood hobby. The Legos were packed away and sent to younger cousins. By his early 20s, Paules had started a landscape design and construction company. He was still building and creating, but it was no longer make-believe.
Those bricks never really lose their appeal, though. About eight years ago, Paules was visiting his parents in Gaithersburg and saw that his Legos had been returned. Tens of thousands of them. Looking around at the bins of multicolored pieces, he remembered how much joy they had brought him.
And so, in his late 20s, he began to build again. For a while, he kept his renewed interest to himself, not wanting people to think he was a nerd or Lego fanatic.
Laughing, Paules explained the term “the brick closet,” a concept familiar to older Legos enthusiasts. It’s “about how people will kind of hide the fact of how much they are into Lego,” Paules said. “And sometimes, if they’re comfortable enough, they call it an outing, which I find hilarious, both as a gay man and as a Lego builder. It’s like another outing all over again.”
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Paules’s boyfriend, Thomas Gillespie, said he also loves Legos but he has always stuck to buying kits and following the instructions. He can’t imagine working on a creation without any guidance, the way Paules does.
“He sees the thing that he wants to build, and then instead of shaping it with clay, he’ll find whatever combination of pieces he needs to make the thing a reality,” Gillespie said. “I’ve told him, ‘You’re an artist; your medium just happens to be Lego.’”
Lego, an abbreviation of the Danish words “leg godt,” meaning “play well,” has manufactured hundreds of billions of plastic building pieces since the company’s founding in Denmark in 1932. (The staggering number helps explain why so many humans have the shared experience stepping on them barefooted.) In his apartment, Paules has a minute fraction of that total, but more than enough to sustain his hobby.
With each increasingly ambitious build, Paules has begun to imagine a future where his hobby becomes a full-time job. Recently, more people have started to inquire about purchasing his creations. He just finished a replica of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, for a Marine pilot who paid him for it, and he has begun work on a large replica of Reagan National Airport.
A vision for another project has been swirling through his head lately. It would be his biggest yet — and, in a sense, his smallest. Paules wants to create a micro-scale Lego version of Washington. Every street, every house, every office building, every restaurant laid out on an enormous diamond-shaped board (minus the southwest chunk that Virginia clawed back from the District in 1847).
“To do every building, every street, to see how amazingly designed D.C. is with all the avenues and perspectives, I think that would be really cool,” Paules said.
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