Bob Carney was nearly 30 when he picked up his first Lego.
His oldest son, then in kindergarten, received a Kraft promotional Lego set of the toy bricks. So Carney hunkered down on the floor with his three children and helped them build tiny structures.
“They grew up, and I didn’t,” said Carney, 72. “It just took off from there. It’s my artistic medium. I’ve been doing this for 30 years now.”
The retired dermatologist lives in Decatur with his wife, Judy, and more than 400,000 Lego bricks. His passion: Constructing miniature versions of castles. He’s made 146 models. The most recent, Rhuddlan Castle in Wales, took six weeks and more than 50,000 bricks.
Carney snapped more than 2,500 images of the castle as it grew, brick by brick. Then, a multimedia editor spliced the photos into a time-lapse video for the Welsh government.
In the three-minute clip, turrets rise and knights in armor march across a green field, seemingly on their own. One of the last frames shows Carney placing the final gray brick on the castle.
“What I really love to do is recreate the castle in a small scale so that I and other people can see what it looked like in its heyday,” he said. “That takes some imagination, sometimes.”
Carney’s interest in castles and medieval times stemmed from a role as a serf in a sixth-grade play.
“I fell in love with it,” Carney said. “I have always been very interested in ancient times, particularly the medieval period with chivalry, swords and sorcery and the like.”
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In 1986, Lego released Black Falcon’s Fortress, giving amateur architects the chance to build round and D-shaped towers for the first time. Carney’s two interests meshed, seemingly permanently.
Carney now designs and builds castles year-round. It takes a couple days to about five months to construct each castle, depending on its size.
His largest project — Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria — took five months and 52,461 Legos. He counts every brick and even breaks the number down by color.
The castles have been displayed at the Children’s Museum of Illinois in Decatur. Carney, who has sold three, said he generally turns down payment, though he was tempted by offers from the French and British governments.
At the end of their life, the castles are broken down, brick by brick. Carney said it has gotten easier to destroy his handiwork.
“I’ve gotten to the point where it’s like scraping your house so you can repaint it,” he said. “It’s a necessity. There’s always more to build.”
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