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The Lego version of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing
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Martin Egemo
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Topline:
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in Agoura Hills is slated to complete construction by the end of 2025, but there's already a Lego version of the historic corridor.
Why it matters: The crossing is going to be the world's largest, and will allow mountain lions and other wild animals to move in and out of the Santa Monica Mountains safely and easily.
Who's behind it: The Lego version is the braindchild of Robert Rock, who's leading the design of the entire bridge project, and his college friend and expert Lego builder, Martin Egemo.
What's next: Rock and Egemo want Lego to put their wildlife crossing set into production. So they entered the project into Lego Ideas, where 10,000 upvotes will automatically trigger an internal review of the model by the Lego team.
The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing has reached iconic status long before its scheduled completion in Agoura Hills by the end of 2025. Not only will it be the largest bridge of its kind for wild animals to traverse in and out of the Santa Monica Mountains, it also has a Hollywood ready mascot in the late P-22. To top it off, the bridge has inspired a Lego set — before a single mountain lion has even set foot atop the decade-in-the-making structure, whose construction has required expertise from across a range of disciplines.
"We have everyone from wildlife biologist to horticulturalist to [expertise in] engineering [and] architecture," said Robert Rock from Living Habitats, the landscape architecture firm in Chicago that is designing the entire project. "We've got a soil scientist, a soil biologist, a mycologist."
A rendering of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, slated for completion in 2025.
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Courtesy of National Wildlife Foundation
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The Lego model of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.
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Courtesy of Living Habitats
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As the folks responsible for the look, feel, functionality and the ecology of the real-life crossing, it shouldn't come as a surprise that Rock and his team are also behind its humbler, and admittedly a smidge less complex, Lego counterpart.
Disclaimer: if you want to get your hands on a set, you'd first need to cast your vote for the project — 10,000 supporters are needed — before Lego would consider mass-producing the set.
The Lego idea
The idea to create a Lego version of the wildlife crossing came to Rock on a muggy August day in 2022, when he was at the zoo in Chicago with his son. To escape the heat, Rock went into the air-conditioned gift shop, and on the display case were boxes of Lego sitting next to a few animal figurines.
"I had this kind of light bulb turn on in my head and I thought, 'huh, well, maybe we could create a Lego version of the crossing just as something fun,'" Rock said.
He knew just the guy to help make it happen — an old college buddy named Martin Egemo, who has picked up Lego as a hobby, someone who's built intricate sets and models off his imagination.
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Courtesy of Living Habitats
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"I still remember that [day]. Rob called me and he's like, 'Hey, I've got this crazy idea. What do you think?'" said Egemo, who's known in the Lego community as TMX. "I just thought, yes, this sounds awesome."
The building process
Over the next year, the team started to design and build their Lego crossing, a process that gave Egemo a crash course in the painstaking work done by Rock and Living Habitats to make the real-life crossing a reality. In exchange, he said, "I was able to help show them what Lego is capable of doing."
Like many creative challenges, the first order of business to making a Lego model from scratch was to understand the parameters.
"Honestly one of the biggest challenges was that we had to pick a scale to work in the Lego universe," Rock said.
"How big are we going to go with this? What is our true goal? What are we trying to showcase?" Egemo said.
A question Rock had posed to Egemo early in the process was whether the Denmark-based toy giant would ever consider manufacturing their set commercially. The answer from Egemo was yes, but only if they enter it into something called Lego Ideas, where 10,000 upvotes from the public will trigger an internal review of the project by the company.
The Lego model of the wildlife crossing features trees and animals that are part of the Southern California landscape.
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Courtesy of Living Habitats
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One of the competition's requirements is that a submission has to be made up of under 3,000 parts. Using that as a baseline, Rock and Egemo began to figure out other aspects of the model — which details to lose, which to amplify — down to how the layers of soil should look like at the bridge's cross-section.
"Our goal isn't to show 10 lanes of the freeway. Our goal is to really showcase all the different types of plants that they are going to source that came from the area itself. So we've got to use the right colors, the right shapes and sizes," Egemo said. "What are the animals that are going to be crossing this? How can we get those animals included?"
Egemo said he made a down-and-dirty prototype. "I just took Lego and started kind of playing around," he said.
Egemo's Iowa home office during the Lego build.
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Martin Egemo
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Then Rock and his team took what he did, supercharged the design and created a digital model that came with instructions on how to piece together the more than 2,300 Lego parts needed for the build.
"I think we had to go to something like 14 or 15 different vendors because of some of the colors that we used," Rock said. "You've got a lot of ochres and olive colors in the landscape. Finding those colors within the Lego world, sometimes that was a little bit challenging."
Soon, bags and bags of the bricks arrived at Egemo's home in Des Moines, Iowa. Organizing them alone — and by color — took between 10 to 12 hours.
Egemo estimated the construction itself took 16 to 20 hours over the course of about 10 days. The final product weighed in between 10 to 15 pounds, at a dimension of 23 by 10 by 8 inches.
Rock remembers seeing the finished model at Egemo's home for first time.
"In the line of work that I do, we understand scale, we understand the size of things," Rock said. "Seeing that in person, seeing the scale of it, the degree of specificity and the technical process that [Egemo] had to go through, I was kind of in shock."
The debut
The model was finished shortly before this year's P-22 Day festival held at Griffith Park in October, where Rock and Egemo had planned to unveil their miniature creation.
The two friends drove from Iowa to Los Angeles with the Lego crossing in the back of the SUV, because they had decided against shipping it. "Lego's strong, but we didn't glue anything," Egemo said.
Caltrans workers working on the construction of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing
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Courtesy of Caltrans
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On their way, they picked up a bunch of Lego for kids attending the festival to build their own versions of the real-life crossing.
"I'm not sure that there's a better way to tell the story of all of the passion that's bound up in this hopeful project than to imagine it through the ingenuity of a child, right?" Rock said.
As to Egemo, he finally got to see the inspiration behind his and Rock's yearlong passion project, as the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing sprouted to life from the 101.
"That was so cool driving on the freeway, seeing the construction in process, and knowing that in some way I'm a part of this, and it made it even more real," Egemo said.
