As a way to honor a young boy who loved building blocks, a 118-foot Lego tower, perhaps the tallest in the world, was constructed in the city of Tel Aviv.
The tower is not entirely built with the Lego products, but contains other materials with the goal of being the tallest structure with interlocking plastic bricks, The New York Times reported. Some half a million toy bricks were used for the project.
It now stands in Rabin Square in the central part of the Israeli city to memorialize Omer Sayag, who died from cancer at age 8 in 2014.
During his illness, Omer built complex Lego constructions, according to the Jerusalem Post. That included a replica of the Taj Mahal that he donated to a Lego exhibition in 2014.
The boy’s teachers, knowing of his passion for building blocks, decided to start an initiative to build the structure they named Omer Tower.
The city joined with Young Engineers, an organization that promotes the use of toy bricks for learning, to build the tower. Thousands of people from several organizations worked for two weeks in December to build the structure in sections decorated with colorful blocks. Names of the organizations are written in Hebrew or Arabic on the tower.
The tower actually stands 117 feet, 11 inches, about 35 inches taller than a similar structure built in Milan, Italy, in 2015. Officials in Tel Aviv plan to submit the measurements to Guinness World Records to confirm it is the tallest structure made with interlocking plastic bricks.