10-Nov-15 – The biggest LEGO exhibition in the United Kingdom has invited an Illinois Institute of Technology architecture student to display his LEGO model of downtown Chicago in London next month but there is a catch.

While the organizers of Brick 2015 will pay for Rocco Buttliere to fly over and stay a few days, they have told Rocco his LEGO model will have to find its own way to London. Buttliere says the cost to ship 43 LEGO skyscrapers over and back would be $5,500, including insurance.

The British have asked Rocco to send over his entire display, composed of 60,000 LEGO bricks.

“The U.K. has never experienced a display quite like mine,” says Rocco (left). Buttliere has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money. On Monday, with 20 days left in the campaign, he had pledges totaling $810. According to Buttliere, he was invited to Brick 2015 in person by a representative of the London event who attended Brickworld Chicago in June.

(Above) Buttliere’s display of 39 LEGO models at this year’s Brickworld Chicago. He has built four buildings since June.

Buttliere has been working on the display for six years, starting with LEGO models of individual buildings and now focused on depicting a contiguous urban landscape.

“Not only for the purpose of connecting individual models of buildings adjacent to one another in real life,” he explains, “but to portray a realistic expression of a cityscape.”

Eventually, he says, the display will include all of downtown Chicago.

Brick 2015 will be held December 9-13 at ExCel London, an exhibition center on a 100-acre site in east London. The models would be shipped, in hard plastic tool trunks as one unit strapped to a palette, by a carrier recommended by Brick 2015 organizers.