The real Scotia Place isn’t even completed yet, but that didn’t stop one Calgary Flames superfan from bringing it to life through LEGO. Sixteen-year-old Cruz Paredes says it took four months and around 6,000 pieces, but the end result has been well worth this labour of love. “I love the Flames, I’m a big Flames fan, and when I saw the renders for the new arena, I decided to try and take it on as a project,” Paredes said. “I just went online and I found a bunch of the rendering photos, and I broke it down kind of section by section, and just tried to do my best to recreate it,” he continued. Paredes had the opportunity to show off his creation at the annual Brick Roundup: a convention hosted at the University of Calgary’s MacEwan Hall that brings in creators across Calgary. “As soon as I saw the new stadium design being built out of LEGO, we knew we needed that at Brick Roundup,” said Brick Roundup Organizer Michael Tyess. “Having a younger builder here is very influential on the younger children that can see themselves in him, because they’re closer in age and everybody then understands you could just build LEGO your whole life,” Tyess continued. Tyess says Brick Roundup usually only allows adult builders, but the opportunity to showcase a young Calgary builder and his incredible creation was too good to pass up. It wasn’t just Brick Roundup hoping to recognize Paredes, he was also recognized with a “Canadianity” award, an award to highlight exceptional Canadian LEGO builds. “Across Canada this year, there was an initiative to recognize good Canadian builds. And the fact that at our show the winner of that built a local landmark that’s going to be here is very cool,” Tyess said. As for Paredes’s build, he spent countless hours poring over specific details to match the renders and what the real building would look like as close as possible. “All the red and yellow are the people of the C of Red, and then the trees and then there’s also planters. I tried my best just to get every detail that I saw on the renderings down, just to try and make it look as real as possible,” Paredes said. A castle one year in the making Paredes was one of 82 builders at Brick Roundup, and one prominent work featured was a giant castle that multiple builders from the Southern Alberta LEGO Users Group (SALUG). Builders worked on individual sections before putting the masterpiece together, and the act of simply assembling it for display took 12 hours. As for the amount of time it took to actually assemble each piece, Tyess says several builders started an entire year ago. “Everything just comes apart in manageable chunks, so when we get to the location, we can assemble it like a puzzle,” Tyess said. It’s a vast landscape with a mountain towering over a castle town. Any individual section is packed with details; whether it’s an army of demons spawning out of a portal, eldritch beings performing a sacrifice at Stone Henge, armed soldiers defending their tower, or more, there is something to catch your eye on every inch of this creation. Tyess hopes that creation, alongside the hundreds of others, is not just exciting to look at, but also inspiring. “I’m excited to inspire the next generation of builders. And I’ve actually seen the kids at the show grow up to be the builders in the club, and are now some of the best builders at this show, in my opinion,” Tyess said.
