LEGO has been especially pushing their brand, by means of some new in-development sets, to attract the purchase of adults not just to give to their children, but for themselves. While LEGO might want its products to be enjoyable to all ages, they probably never thought it might catch the fancy of an 81-year-old man.
Said cool old guy is Stuart Blumberg, retired president of the hotel association for Miami-Dade County. Blumberg even got into LEGO at such an advanced age, attempting his first build at 78. That was the beginning of his LEGO experience that lasted some three years.
His set builds advanced from vehicles to building models, and now he’s taken on an MOC project in honor of a local structure he had been personally invested in: the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. He had been part of a group that pushed for the construction of the center back in the 1990s, not opening until 2006.
Blumberg had the brick design for the Arsht Center created by Brett Thiessen of StadiumBrick on Etsy, along with the necessary LEGO pieces to construct it. This MOC not only has more bricks in it than the LEGO Harry Potter Hogwarts Castle micro-scale set (71043, 6000+ pieces), it almost reaches the amount to assemble the LEGO Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcon (75192).
Despite the effort and building time, Blumberg was ecstatic as he recalled his time on the board that oversaw the delayed construction of the real Arsht Center. “Building it was emotional,” he said. “Watching it being built again. In reality. In real time. Each time, I put something in there, it was like watching the real building be built all over again.” He has shown the build to the center’s namesake, retired philanthropist Adrienne Arsht, who was impressed.