My name is Deepak Shenoy and I am an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO). I live in the North-Eastern US with my wife and daughter. I am an engineer by profession, but I like to spend my spare time designing and building my own LEGO creations.
Most people who build with LEGO as adults can trace their affinity for these plastic bricks back to their childhoods. In my case, I grew up in India and was oblivious to LEGO, at least during my childhood years. After I moved to the US as a young adult, I became vaguely familiar with LEGO, but I always dismissed it as just another children’s toy. In fact, I never managed to actually get my hands on any LEGO bricks until I became a dad myself. It all started back in 2016, when my then 5-year-old daughter received a LEGO set as a birthday gift. She wanted me to help her build LEGO houses and vehicles using the bricks that came in the set. The more time I spent with her building these little models, the more I was impressed by the quality of this so-called children’s toy. Not only are LEGO bricks available in a wide variety of types and colors, they are also built to remarkably tight tolerances and always fit together precisely with just the right amount of friction (no matter how many times you take them apart and put them back together).
An offhand suggestion from my daughter that we try to build a “really tall building” out of LEGO led me to stumble into a new hobby. I have loved skyscrapers from the time I was a kid (long before I had the opportunity to see one in real life) and LEGO seemed to be just the perfect medium for building my own custom replicas of these amazing structures. LEGO is readily available (though not exactly cheap), easy to work with (without the need to learn any new skills), and endlessly reconfigurable. Armed with a good understanding of scale and proportion that my training as an engineer had provided, I set to work designing and building models of some of the most iconic skyscrapers that make up the skylines of cities like New York and Chicago.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I had a portfolio of skyscraper models which ranged in height from 4 to 6 feet tall. I was able to display these models in a few LEGO conventions, and they were also featured in various print publications and online blogs. Over time, I expanded my horizons within the hobby to create models of other types of architectural landmarks (not just skyscrapers). I even ventured outside my comfort zone of architecture-themed builds to explore other facets of the hobby including mosaics, sculptures, etc. Then, during the peak of the lockdown in 2020, I started this blog with the goal of sharing everything I had learned from building LEGO models. It includes posts covering the various building techniques I have used, the math underlying these techniques and other concepts such as scale and proportion, as they apply to LEGO builds.
My new book titled ‘The LEGO Builder’s Handbook’ essentially grew out of these blog posts. Some of the chapters in the book are reworked versions of my blog posts, while the rest were written completely from scratch. Hopefully, this book can prove to be a useful resource for everyone in the LEGO community, whether you are taking your first step towards building your own LEGO creations, or have plenty of experience, and are simply looking to level up your building skills.