The Science Center of Iowa is a pretty amazing place – it’s home to an impressive digital planetarium and special exhibits that allow visitors get up close with Iowa’s native animals, explore the cosmos, build a rocket ship and more.
One hands on exhibit is of special interest to anyone who once built a castle or space ship with plastic blocks. Brick by Brick is a permanent exhibit that centers on LEGOs® in a way that’s both educational and surprising.
Here’s what you need to know to discover your inner builder at the Science Center of Iowa.
The center is a science museum located in Des Moines, Iowa. It opened in 1970 and since 2005 has been located at 401 W Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.
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The museum believes play is the gateway to creativity, so in 2018 it opened an exhibit that pairs giant LEGO®-built structures with hands-on building challenges.
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The exhibit uses LEGO bricks to demonstrate how architects and engineers use design and science to make seemingly impossible ideas work.
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A LEGO-Certified professional named Adam Reed Tucker built the exhibit. Each of his models took hundreds of hours of trial and error and thousands of LEGO bricks to construct.
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These are not ordinary LEGO creations. Here are a few examples of Tucker’s models: Burj Khalifa - the tallest building in the world, Cinderella’s Castle (built to withstand Florida’s 100-mile-per-hour hurricane winds) and Fallingwater - the Frank Lloyd Wright residence considered the “best all-time work of American architecture.”
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Brick by Brick includes exhibit stations and building challenges. You can build and test structures to see how they can withstand earthquakes and heavy winds. You can also explore unconventional LEGO building techniques to tackle design challenges.
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One of the displays might look a little familiar. It’s a 75,000-brick model of the Science Center of Iowa, created by the Iowa LEGO Users Group.
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The Science Center of Iowa is open weekly, on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Interested in exploring more Iowa museums? Here are seven that hold fascinating and quirky collections.
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Address: Science Center of Iowa, 401 W Martin Luther King Jr Pkwy, Des Moines, IA 50309, USA
