Lego monuments on display at Glendale Galleria

Eight-year-old Alysiah Loptson examined, in awe, a replica of the U.S. Supreme Court building at the Glendale Galleria on Friday morning.

At 10 feet long, the monument took three builders 450 hours to construct — and it was made entirely of Lego bricks.

“I think it’s really cool,” Alysiah said, while her brother Aiden wondered how the builders got so many bricks.

PHOTOS: Lego monuments at the Galleria

The monument is one of 10 Lego sculptures of historic monuments — created by a team of 18 people out of nearly 1 million Lego pieces — on display throughout the mall this month.

Glendale is the first of nine cities throughout the country, and the only one in California, whose malls this year will host the traveling exhibit, which includes a life-size replica of the Liberty Bell, as well as a 9-foot-tall sculpture of the Statute of Liberty and a 2.5-foot-tall sculpture of the White House.

The largest Lego monument featured in the exhibit is that of the U.S. Capitol Building, which took a team of eight builders 1,700 hours to build.

“It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. It’s incredible,” said Josie Borden, a La Cañada resident who stumbled upon the Capitol Building while shopping. “I’m used to the Legos my grandson plays with — this is big scale.”

The Lego pieces used to construct the monuments are actually the same standard pieces available at the Lego store.

“Technically anyone can build this,” said Vince Rubino, Lego’s senior manager of event marketing. “There are no special pieces, no short cuts.”

The builders did, however, include metal pieces inside the structures for support and glued the pieces together for safe traveling, he added.

The exhibit, which features a play area for children to build race cars and other structures out of Legos, runs through Feb. 22.

Lego produced a similar monument tour in the late 1980s, though all of the sculptures on display at the Glendale mall were rebuilt from scratch last year and designed with more details and accuracy, Rubino said.

“What we found back then, the pride in America still resonates now,” Rubino said. “These are buildings everybody knows about, that children studied in school.”

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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @atchek