Deep Shen is the moniker I have used for all my LEGO-related posts on social media. It is a slightly abbreviated version of my real name (Deepak Shenoy). I have been fascinated with skyscrapers for as long as I can remember – even though I didn’t get a chance to see one in real life until I was a young adult. That fascination has only deepened over the years – I still marvel at skyscrapers with wide-eyed admiration whenever I see them, but I now also have a greater appreciation for the history behind some of the most iconic skyscrapers in the world and how they came to be built.
Most people who build with LEGO as adults can trace their affinity for the plastic bricks back to their childhoods. In my case I was quite oblivious to LEGO during my childhood years and didn’t actually get my hands on the now-ubiquitous bricks until I was a dad myself. As I helped my daughter build little animals and vehicles out of LEGO, I couldn’t help being impressed by the quality of this so-called children’s toy. Not only are LEGO bricks available in a wide variety of types and colors, they are also built to remarkably tight tolerances and always fit together precisely with just the right amount of friction (no matter how many times you take them apart and put them back together).
An offhand suggestion from my daughter that we build a “really tall building” out of LEGO led me to stumble into a new hobby. In LEGO, I found a medium that was readily available (though not exactly cheap), easy to work with, endlessly reconfigurable and of course perfectly suited to building models of the skyscrapers I had long admired. Armed with a good understanding of scale and proportion that my training as an engineer had provided, I set to work designing and building models of many of the iconic skyscrapers that make up the skylines of cities like New York and Chicago.
My models have been displayed in major LEGO conventions and featured in some of the leading LEGO print publications as well as online blogs. I continue to work on expanding my portfolio of models (both real and digital) and post regularly on Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, etc.