THUNDER BAY -- Children of all ages now have the chance to see famous local buildings made out of Lego.
The Thunder Bay Museum is featuring more than six model replicas of Thunder Bay buildings as part of a larger exhibit called City Beautiful that showcases local architecture both past and present. The Lego models were built by Kieran Marcus. “He’s been working at this for the past seven or eight years just as a hobby, and he’s always had an interest in museums and pictures of what Thunder Bay used to look like,” says Tory Tronrud, the museum director and curator.
He adds that Marcus frequently visited the museum archives to get copies of pictures that he would use as a basis for his models.
Tonrud says the fact that a lot of the city’s historic buildings are gone presented a dilemma for the architecture exhibit. “We knew that it was going to be fairly two-dimensional because it was going to be pictures, basically,” he says. “So when Kieran made it known about his Lego pieces, we thought that’s the perfect three-dimensional feature.”
There are models of the former McKellar Hospital, St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Riverdale Public School, Canadian Bank of Commerce, Vickers High School, Thunder Bay Multicultural Association, Fort William Central School and old city hall.
The exhibit shows that Thunder Bay is a treasure trove of different architectural styles. Tonrud says about 20 major styles are represented, along with visual examples from around town. “Thunder Bay actually has beautiful examples of architecture,” he says. “A lot of people think of history as belonging somewhere else….they don’t see the architecture around them. This exhibit is to help them understand that Thunder Bay is in some respects an architectural masterpiece.”
The exhibit runs until November.
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