Washington DC — By Jon Rochetti on July 19, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Filed under: children, Events, family, featuredarticle, kids

Build to the Sky with Lego Building Blocks at BrickFair

BrickFair Lego Fan Festival 2010 is the largest Lego Festival in the country, covering a full 60,000 sq. feet of exhibit space. Lego builders of all ages create fantastic creations of buildings, trains, robots, airplanes, complete towns and even monsters which are sure to delight kids of all ages.

Lego R2D2 robot This year, in a new space at the larger Dulles Expo Center, the larger space is sure to hold the estimated seven to ten thousand people that typically attend the annual DC expo.

Stop by the BrickFilms theater and watch the numerous stop-motion or digitally created films using Legos as the stars. Then let the kids play with thousands and thousands of Lego pieces. And if you need to take home some Logo pieces, shop for the classic Lego building blocks and specialty Lego items on sale by the 14 Lego vendors attending.

With roughly 400 billion Lego pieces in circulation, the creative building toy first introduced in 1949 are one of the world’s most popular toys.

Here’s a few fun Lego facts:

Annually, close to 20 billion Lego bricks are manufactured, or about 650 pieces every second of every day.
Children around the globe spend about 5 billion hours annually playing and building with Legos.
The longest Lego display was a weaving tubular display close to 5,200 feet long that used close to 3 million Lego bricks.
The company’s name comes form the Danish words leg godt meaning “play well”.
In Latin, the word lego translates to “I put together.”
The Lego brick design was patented in 1961.
The tallest tower made from Lego bricks rose to over 94 feet (28m) and used 465,000 bricks.

Other annual Lego fairs happen around the country including in Raleigh, Fremont, Portland, outside of Chicago and in Seattle each October.