Great bricks, great places: Artist makes Mount Rushmore entirely out of Lego

One of the things that often surprises people about Mount Rushmore is how small it looks — especially from the distance of the viewing platform.

Well, what if it was even smaller? And made of Lego?

A model of Mount Rushmore — made out of 22,000 Lego bricks — will be featured in Kentucky at the BrickUniverse Lego Convention in February 2020.

Lego artist Rocco Buttliere spent over 400 hours designing the sculpture, and another 150 hours building it.

Buttliere, who will have over 50 landmarks and skyscrapers built from Lego at the convention, called it the hardest creation he's designed and built.

"I'm used to doing strictly architecture," he said.

Buttliere, who said he's probably visited Mount Rushmore 10 times on family vacations, said the faces were the hardest part to recreate using only the Lego bricks, although he found the use of 3-D scans of the faces to be helpful.

He eventually settled on using different colors of bricks to represent the different stages of the carved rock, he said.

"I think it makes you more creative," Buttliere said of the restrictions set by working with nothing but Lego bricks. "You have to solve a problem using only what you have at your fingertips."