07-02-2025
Your vote could make the long-anticipated Milwaukee Art Museum LEGO set a reality
Next summer, you may finally be able to buy a Milwaukee Art Museum LEGO set, complete with working "wings" that open and close.
Former Milwaukee resident Todd Elliott ― the designer behind last year's viral Brewers Famous Racing Sausages LEGO set idea ― recently refined his art museum model, which he's been perfecting for the past few years. Soon, you can vote for it online to be considered for production as a limited-edition LEGO set.
Last month, Elliott's new museum design was accepted to BrickLink's Designer Program competition. BrickLink is a LEGO Group-owned online community, marketplace and design software popular with adult fans of the toy brand. Through the Designer Program, anyone with a free BrickLink account can vote for their favorite designs.
Then, BrickLink selects five winning creations based on "their own internal review of the design, how good it looks, how fun or easy it would be to build, and how much fan support there was," Elliott said Tuesday. Winning sets with over 3,000 pre-orders will be produced, but only 30,000 of each limited-edition set will be available for purchase.
Voting for BrickLink's Designer Program Series 7 ― in which Elliott's art museum is participating ― opens at 2 p.m. Monday and runs through Feb. 21. BrickLink will announce the five winners March 17. If Elliott's design is selected, fans can pre-order it in February 2026 and will receive it around July 2026.
Elliott began workshopping a LEGO model of the Milwaukee Art Museum's Quadracci Pavilion and Calatrava-designed "wings" a few years ago. The Army veteran and Philadelphia father of two was inspired by a much-celebrated Milwaukee Art Museum LEGO model by a 3D artist from Budapest in 2019, which received local media attention and nearly became an official LEGO set.
The designer of that model, Vida Andras, posted his creation to LEGO Ideas, a LEGO-run online community where users can share their ideas and potentially have them turned into official sets. It's similar to BrickLink's Designer Program, but the sets aren't sold on a limited-edition basis. If a design receives 10,000 votes from LEGO Ideas users, LEGO reviews it for consideration as an official product. Andras' art museum hit 10,000 votes, but, in 2021, LEGO announced it wouldn't produce the set.
"I was really bummed because I wanted to buy one," Elliott told the Journal Sentinel in December. "So, a couple of years ago, I sat down and tried to figure out how he built it based on the pictures he had submitted. I kind of reverse-engineered it" using Studio by BrickLink ― a software that allows LEGO fans to virtually design almost anything using unlimited brick styles and colors.
Andras' design was about two feet long and 1½ feet wide, Elliott said. He's unsure if Andras built that art museum model in real life or only rendered it virtually, but, when Elliott attempted to build it, the wings were "so heavy that they drooped and sagged, so it didn't look good," he said.
Elliott said he attempted to reach out to Andras on social media but received no response, so he went "back to the drawing board" and developed another version of the museum that's about half the size of Andras' model.
In November, after the popularity of his Racing Sausages design, Elliott posted the step-by-step instructions for that 775-piece museum design to Rebrickable ― a website that lets LEGO enthusiasts share their designs and connects users with resellers, allowing them to smoothly obtain the necessary bricks to re-create designs that aren't official LEGO sets.
Elliott said he posted the instructions for free because the design was "heavily influenced" by Andras', and he felt it wouldn't be fair to profit from it. As of late December, Elliott said the instructions have been downloaded over 1,000 times after he shared them on the r/Milwaukee subreddit and the design was posted on the museum's official social media accounts.
Elliott continued tweaking his design before submitting it to BrickLink's Designer Program and now feels it's sufficiently different from Andras'.
"When I submitted it, I said that there have been a couple of similar ideas in the past, and I definitely took inspiration from them," he said. "But, I felt like when they accepted it, they also determined it was distinct enough to be its own design."
With his latest model, Elliott said he focused on ensuring that both the wings and the base of the structure were more stable. In addition to rendering the model online, he tested out the wings in the real world.
"I built it with actual LEGOs to see that the wings would be supported and were still movable," he said. "You can put the wings up or down, like what happens with the actual museum."
Overall, Elliott said his new museum is "just a much better-looking design."
"The other thing I changed ... internally there's a much stronger support, so you can pick up the model without worrying about it falling apart. Lastly, on the back of the museum where the window panes are, there is this slight curve to the building that kind of melts into the foundation. That's really tricky to do with LEGOs, but I found a way."
More: This Brewers fan designed Racing Sausages figurines. You can help make them an official LEGO set.
More: Meet the mom behind the hilarious Facebook page recreating I-43 construction with Playmobil
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How to vote for Todd Elliott's Milwaukee Art Museum LEGO set
