Oklahoma City Gets Rebuilt with LEGOs

By Rusty Surette, NEWS 9

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Kurt Zimmerle is spending his entire summer in Oklahoma City recreating and duplicating major landmarks around town with toys.

"I'm here in Oklahoma City to build Oklahoma City out of LEGO bricks to be used as a fundraiser for a the new school called EDUCARE", said Zimmerle who is an official LEGO Master Builder from Michigan.

His latest project is called OK CITYSCAPE.

"Last summer I visited Oklahoma City, drove around and took a whole ton of pictures and went back to Michigan and in my spare time I was building different buildings from the pictures I took," said Zimmerle.

He's now here in Oklahoma City to finish what he started. Zimmerle said he works 12 hours a day and several hours on the weekend.

OK CITYSCAPE will feature the Ford Center, Bricktown, the Oklahoma City National Memorial and all the towers that make up the Oklahoma City skyline. Zimmerle is expected to use over one million LEGO bricks for OK CITYSCAPE, and he said the most difficult part of the project is duplicating a building that has yet to be built.

"It's the new Devon Tower. If you can picture a six-sided building and three of those points indent and go back out as a bay window," said Zimmerle. "I don't know who designed that, but it's a tricky building."

Zimmerle graduated in 1996 from Principia College in Illinois with a job offer any third-grader would envy: official LEGO Master Builder. An art student with a knack for self-promotion, he'd come to the building-block maker's attention in 1992 after sending them a video of his scale LEGO model of North Carolina's Biltmore Estate.

Since then, Zimmerle has assembled models for commercial photo shoots, mall and toy-store promotions and displays for LEGO stores all over the country.

"It's fun. I'm sculpting with the brick," said Zimmerle. "I mean, life doesn't get much better than this."

Learn more about OK CITYSCAPE, which will be on display this November inside Penn Square Mall inside the old American Eagle store. His time and the LEGOs being used are all possible thanks to donations and sponsorships from businesses across the state.

OK CITYSCAPE's fundraisign efforts will help OKC Educare, a unique partnership between Inasmuch Foundation, Sunbeam Family Services, Community Action Agency and Oklahoma City Public Schools to provide high quality early education (birth to five) to the most disadvantaged children in our community.

Research shows that Educare will provide low-income children a greater opportunity for emotional, social and cognitive success later in life.

Starting in 2009, OKC Educare will serve 200 children in a LEED Certified 30,000 square foot facility that will be the flagship early education site in Oklahoma City. One third of the site space is dedicated for family programming as families are the cornerstone of the Educare model.