Red Clay Consolidated School District claimed the Guinness World Record for the tallest LEGO brick tower Monday night.
Superintendent Merv Daugherty placed the final section on the 110-foot-tall plastic structure around 6:45 at John Dickinson High School.
Assistant Superintendent Ted Ammann has camped in his RV near the tower since Wednesday to help oversee the project. He says the tower is five stories high, with more than 500,000 LEGO pieces, and weighs almost two thousand pounds.
[caption id="attachment_48486" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Red Clay's LEGO tower reaches 110 feet into the air at Dickinson H.S. (Courtesy: Red Clay School Dist)."][/caption]
“We came up with the idea in the fall and then starting in March we had each of our 28 schools we all given a section of the tower to build because it was obviously too much for any one person to build," said Ammann. "That was one of the themes we wanted to reinforce with our students that one person may not be able to do something like this but by working together everyone has a piece.”
Ammann adds the record-breaking tower in some ways resembles the Empire State Building.
“It has that similar profile, where it starts off larger at the bottom and then it raises up in the air and gets narrower as it goes and gets to about 30 feet and then it has a standard square shape going up to about three-quarters of the tower. Then from there it tapers into -- not quite a point -- but it tapers in from there.”
Local engineers and architects helped design the temporary structure. A local architecture firm measured the tower’s height with a rotary laser and detector Monday with an adjudicator from Guinness World Records on hand to certify the results.
The District’s tower breaks the previous record of 106 feet, 7 inches, set by a tower constructed in Prague in the Czech Republic and was constructed without using school funds.