It stands at 112 feet and 11¾ inches tall, establishing a new world record for a tower constructed with interlocking plastic bricks, aka Legos.
Brick by small plastic brick, the students of Delaware’s Red Clay School Consolidated District diligently snapped together each Lego section of the new Guinness World Record setter, toppling the previous tower’s record of 106 feet. The prior record-holding Lego tower was built in Prague in 2012.
Every year, the Red Clay Consolidated School District creates a “theme” for the first few months of school, says assistant superintendent Ted Ammann, who spearheaded the tower project.
Because the district is embarking on a multimillion-dollar construction and renovation campaign, it made sense to the district administrators to make the theme for the kick off of the year about construction … building something.
“We thought, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great to do something with Legos?’ And then we started talking about trying to break the record for the tallest structure,” Ammann says.
TOTAL EFFORT
Nearly every student in the district contributed to building the tower. The toy bricks were pieced together in sections by students over several months; then those sections were stacked by multiple different companies who volunteered to help. The companies constructed the tower around a metal cylinder and used tension cables to keep it from tipping over. The finished tower weighed nearly a ton.
Every one of the 28 schools in the Red Clay Consolidated School District—grammar, middle school, high school, and special needs—contributed sections. Collecting the more than 500,000 toy bricks needed was a feat onto itself with students, parents, teachers, district administrators, as well as companies and organizations in the community, all contributing to the “brick drive.” After months of work in classrooms across the district and a few days of painstaking constructing provided by multiple companies, the stacks of Lego bricks were pieced together to create the 11-story tower that loomed high over John Dickinson High School outside of Wilmington.
TR2
The Red Clay Consolidated School District set a new world record for a tower constructed with Legos.
EXACT MEASUREMENT
The district wanted to make certain the 10-story effort would be recognized by Guinness World Records as the tallest Lego tower, which meant they needed to follow the many strict rules Guinness has for establishing a new record. This meant the structure must be free-standing and constructed only from standard bricks available at stores. Also, no adhesives could be used.
“It was critical to the district and the Guinness World Records adjudicator that the height of the tower be measured exactly, which is why we were called in,” states Adam W. Jones, PLS (Professional Land Surveyor) with the Becker Morgan Group, Dover, Delaware. ”We used the Topcon QS in reflectorless mode to measure slope distance and vertical angle.”
Jones continues: “The measurements did not deviate more than 0.01 feet, which is what we expected. This was all done to allow us to give the Guinness official and the hundreds of spectators a final height with confidence as soon as the last piece was set in place.”
RECORD ACHIEVED
The official certificate from the Guinness World Records record adjudicator that was presented on August 19, 2013, to Delaware’s Red Clay Consolidated School District documents that the students’ cooperative efforts had really done it … they established a new world record for the tallest structure built from Legos. ■
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Modern Contractor Solutions, January 2014

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