As a child I played with old LEGO sets a lot. Growing up in a single income family with three siblings meant that there was not a lot of money for new sets, so most of my time was spent with old bricks from the 70s and 80s. Over time, I switched to K’nex, some old Meccano sets, and later on I experimented with electronical components and circuits and finally ventured into programming when I was about 12.
But that LEGO phase has never really ended. Even though the only set that was ever ‘mine’ during childhood - 6328 Lego City Police helicopter transport - is still in a box of sentimental stuff, I’ve kept looking at LEGO sets whenever I passed a toy shop. I didn’t really buy anything though. Even though I played with LEGO from a previous generation - and it’s obviously made to last, It felt wrong to buy plastic parts just for my own entertainment.
That changed during Covid. Even though I was busy with my job and the Red Cross, I bought 10266 Apollo 11 Lunar Lander. But that has been it for the past few years. Up until about a year ago.
What I really wanted as a child was not to build these sets, but come up with my own constructions. But there were never enough bricks to do that. I didn’t spend the last years of my childhood at home, but living in youth care. Given the circumstances at home, I had to grow up fast. Now I’m 30 I’m finally processing things, and part of that has been to give my inner child some space. Now with some budget to make this dream of building my own creations come true!
After buying some architectural sets like 21060 Himeji Castle and 21058 Pyramid of Giza, and several smaller sets for parts, I wanted to recreate a world wonder myself.
Back in March 2019 I had the privilege to travel to Petra, Jordan. This is still one of my favorite trips. Walking a few kilometers through a tall narrow gorge and suddenly seeing the Treasury appear in the distance was such an exciting experience!
We walked up to one of the viewpoints to this amazing view:
The scale of the valley and the treasury, while being surrounded by tall rock faces, was something I wanted to include in the design. After many orders of bricks on Bricklink and many evenings of fitting bricks and changing designs this is the design I ended up with:
Which can be opened up to be able to display it from more angles:
And a few weeks ago I created this gif to showcase that mechanism:
Partway through designing the model and figuring out what parts to use I decided to also submit this to Lego IDEAS. If this gets to 10.000 votes it might become an actual set! It’s currently at a little over 2100 votes, so quite a bit on it’s way. If you’d like, you can vote as well!
