Penn State Lego Whiz Finds Inspiration in Nittany Lion, Old Main and Joe Paterno

About that Ohio State professor who built a mini Ohio Stadium out of 1 million Lego pieces? Get to work Penn State!

I tweeted those words a few days ago, wondering if Penn State had its own version of the Ohio State Lego master. Within minutes of hitting “send,” I had my answer: Jordan Ford, Penn State’s Lego king.

Four years ago, Ford went back to his childhood home in Hershey with some fellow Penn State graduates and found a few bins of Legos. The friends, all Lion Ambassadors, dusted them off and brought them to State College, where they were spending the summer working and taking internships.

With the rest of their time, they decided to build Old Main out of Legos.

In reality, they built it a few times, tearing down their first few attempts, which looked “terrible.”

The architects weren’t engineers. Ford, 25, majored in advertising; fellow Lego builder Lee Citarella studied crime, law and justice; and Steve Renaldo was in pre-med. “We had some fun trying to figure out what the heck we were doing,” Ford recalls.

Approximately 150 hours later, they had turned about 8,000 Legos—including the extra pieces and windows picked up on eBay— into a respectable replica, weighing in at 20 pounds. The following summer they built the Armory.

After Ford’s friends left State College, he needed another Lego fix. So he started building mosaics of the Nittany Lion logo and Joe Paterno. (Check out photos of all four of his Lego creations in the photo gallery to the right.)

He has no idea if Paterno has seen it. “Heck, if he wanted it, it’s his,” says Ford, an assistant director for Penn State’s Office of Annual Giving.

Ford posted his Lego portfolio on Facebook, and several people have asked about a price tag. (Doubting their seriousness, Ford never follows through.) But for the most part, he keeps his hobby quiet. It just screams nerdom. When his girlfriend visited his apartment for the first time, Ford stopped her at the door and said, “OK, now this is going to seem kind of weird… .” (For the record, she thinks it’s kind of cool.)

And Beaver Stadium? Ford has always hoped that it would one day be his masterpiece, but for now he just doesn’t have the time or disposable income to devote to it. And he wasn’t thrilled to learn that a Ohio State professor had already pulled off that feat for his own university. “I saw that and thought, ‘Oh, great — Ohio State beat us in one more thing.’”

Later in life, after he pays some bills, builds up a bigger savings, and checks off some other priorities, he pictures himself in his own workshop, toiling like a furniture maker or a painter.

For now, the Lego creations are in Ford’s apartment. The two mosaics brighten his wall, while Old Main sits on top of his entertainment center and the Armory is perched precariously on an old table in the corner.

The childhood hobby, it seems, has created a grown-up challenge: decorating with Lego sculptures.