National Museum of the Marine Corps

One of the fun things about traveling all these weeks is that we often get to stop at places we normally would not get to if we were quickly traveling to FL. We recently stopped at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. It was a very nice and well put together museum. As normal, I did not read every plaque. My dad always use to read every plaque in a museum. It used to drive all of us kids crazy!

Iron Mike

Elianna trying her hand at chin ups.

This was an awesome Lego display of the Iwo Jima sculpture.

Artist Nathan Sawaya used more than 100,000 standard Lego bricks to create this half-scale sculpture. It took approximately 240 hours in Sawaya's New York studio to design and build.

Sawaya took 180 photos of the original Marine Corps Warm Memorial and used them as the creative basis for this design. A small prototype was first created, and then revisions were made to the prototype before the final size of the model was determined.

To begin a Lego model of this magnitude, Sawaya first maps out the footprint of the design onto a display template. Lego models are built from the bottom upwards, so every brick must be carefully positioned and planned for, according to Sawaya's design.

Sawaya designed this sculpture in more than 20 sections and the entire structure was glued together one brick at a time. The final model was shipped in sections from New York to the museum and assembled on site.

-Taken from the display at the museum

Nathan Sawaya designs all sorts of things using Legos - check out his website at www.BrickArtist.com. There are all sorts of cool things there - it's amazing!