There are 12,060 reasons to clear your weekend calendar. That is the piece count of the new Lego Sagrada Família. It’s the largest, most complex Lego set ever made by piece count, designed around one of the most visually audacious buildings in history. Priced at $800, it is not for everyone, but it sure beats paying for a flight to Barcelona to fight the swarms of tourists buzzing around this iconic landmark.

Lego has produced oversized sets before, many of them bloated monuments to their ambitions, but this one earns every single brick. Translating Antoni Gaudí’s century-spanning, organically erupting, mathematically impossible basilica into a display object you can fit on a bookshelf is not a flex. It is a massive design problem that Lego designers have solved masterfully. 

The set, measuring 24 by 18.5 by 15 inches, is truly the ultimate Lego Architecture masterpiece, a product line that translates most famous architectural marvels into bricks. It is a genuine attempt to bring one of the most visually complex buildings ever conceived—a cathedral that has been under continuous construction since 1882 and still isn’t finished—into a display object that captures its essence in an impressionistic way, but with apparent perfect precision.

The mission, as Lego designer Rok Žgalin Kobe frames it, was not to simplify Gaudí’s vision but to honor it. “We felt an immense responsibility to do justice to the Sagrada Família through this design,” Žgalin Kobe says. “Our goal was to honor Gaudí’s vision with the utmost respect, capturing the rhythm of the basilica’s construction, its extraordinary complexity and ambition, and translating that into an immersive building experience.” 

The key for Žgalin Kobe’s translation is not replication but psychological suggestion. The cluster of bricks that he uses to build the towers, for example, does not recreate the soaring stone nave brick by brick; it gives your brain just enough geometric information to recreate one in your mind. Lego works because the brain fills the blanks, and the better the designer, the less the brain has to work to complete the illusion. With the Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s towers are encrusted with organic, nature-inspired ornamentation—stone that looks like it grew rather than was carved. 

Surreal masterpiece

The Sagrada Familia is one of the great unfinished stories of modern civilization. Construction began on March 19, 1882, commissioned by the devout Catalan bookseller and philanthropist Josep Maria Bocabella. The first architect, Francisco de Paula del Villar, abandoned the project in 1883 after disagreements with Bocabella’s architectural advisor, Joan Martorell, leaving little more than the crypt complete.

Antoni Gaudí, then 31 years old and already radically unconventional, took over that same year and threw out everything, reimagining the structure as a vertical forest of organic towers, parabolic arches, and stained glass designed to flood the interior with colored light. He knew he would never see it finished.

“My client is not in a hurry,” he reportedly said. On June 7, 1926, at age 73, he was struck by a tram on the Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. He died three days later in a hospital, on June 10—this year marks the centennial of that death—with about 15% of the building complete.

The Spanish Civil War dealt a further blow in 1936, when anarchists broke into the site, destroyed Gaudí’s original plans and plaster models, and burned his studio, requiring 16 years of painstaking reconstruction from photographs and surviving fragments before building could properly resume.

On February 20, 2026, workers finally installed the upper arm of the cross atop the Tower of Jesus Christ, the central spire Gaudí always intended as the tallest, reaching 566 feet. The Sagrada Família is now officially the world’s tallest church, surpassing the Ulm Minster in Germany. Pope Leo XIV will bless it on June 10—144 years of construction and counting.

The Lego set mirrors this layered history in the most literal way possible. The build sequence follows the basilica’s actual historical construction order. You begin with the foundational apse and crypt—the oldest surviving section of the real building—move through the Nativity Façade and the dramatic Passion Façade, rise through the grand naves and the Western Sacristy, complete the six iconic towers, and finish with the Eastern Sacristy and the Glory Façade.

Building this set is, in a precise and intentional sense, a reenactment of 144 years of architectural history, compressed into the course of a weekend. As Žgalin Kobe puts it: “Balancing scale and precision, while remaining faithful to a living monument that has been evolving for more than a century, was a unique design challenge, and one we’re incredibly proud of.”

One detail captures Lego’s fidelity to the source material better than anything else: the stained-glass window effect, engineered to echo the way colored light moves through the real basilica’s interior. Gaudí designed the Sagrada Família’s windows with deliberate orientational logic, with warm ambers and reds on the west to capture the setting sun, cool blues and greens on the east for morning light, creating an atmosphere inside the building that shifts hour by hour.

The Lego version cannot move with the sun, obviously, but the designers have built the chromatic suggestion directly into the model’s structure, so that the completed set reads as luminous rather than merely decorative, engineered to be admired from every angle and its inside.

Building a retail brand from scratch is harder than it looks. However, after transforming her jewelry business into a $1 billion brand, Kendra Scott is sharing her learnings with other entrepreneurs, including the three elements that were crucial to her success.

When she started her business, wholesale was key, Scott explained during the Inc. Small Business Week Series. “I didn’t have money for advertising and marketing,” she said. “But Nordstrom, they’re a huge megaphone for my brand. I was in their books or their catalogs. They were doing the marketing for me. And that was driving my direct-to-consumer business or e-commerce business.”

Scott described the ideal retail structure as a pyramid with three sections: a strong wholesale presence at the base, a specialty or experiential retail store in the middle, and e-commerce at the top. “Those three elements together have to work and harmonize together to have a successful business and brand,” she said.

Sharing advice with other entrepreneurs

It’s advice that Scott has passed along to other founders, including Kelly McGee and Cristina Ashbaugh, the co-founders of Yardsale—a ski gear brand specializing in magnetic ski poles that Scott backed as a guest Shark on ABC’s Shark Tank. “Wholesale gives them this opportunity to really learn a lot about their customer and their product experience,” she said. “And, like I said, it’s the foundation for building a really successful brand.”

As a skier, Scott took interest in the brand and closed the deal at $250,000 for 10 percent equity, with a $5 royalty on each sale until she recovers $300,000. “You skiers deserve each other,” Daymond John, a fellow Shark, commented at the time.

Scott’s advice has already started to pay off for McGee and Ashbaugh. “Thanks to Kendra’s guidance, we’ve secured an expansion into REI, marking a major milestone for us, and we’re very excited for the road ahead,” Ashbaugh said.

Turning her company into a $1 billion business

In 2008, Scott opened her first jewelry store in downtown Austin. Since then, she has grown the brand to more than 130 retail locations across the U.S. and over 2,500 employees. She credits her success to engaging with customers and building a company that treats them like family.

“It was this village—this community of love and support—that we started in those very early days of Kendra Scott that has just continued to grow,” she told Inc. in 2022.

Scott knows the middle part of the three-section pyramid well. Leaning into the experiential part of retail, her stores offer jewelry customizations and hat fittings. In March, she opened Beau’s Bar in Nashville. The space, which is Western-inspired, allows shoppers to enjoy cocktails while browsing jewelry, apparel, and boots.

“Retail today is all about experience. If you are a retailer and you are just opening a store and putting product on a shelf and hoping that’s going to build your brand, you are going to fail,” she said.

The four walls of a retail store have to mean something, Scott said. Customers need to feel like they’re stepping into a community that reflects a brand’s culture. The goal is to create an experience so compelling that customers think, “These are my people.”

“Kendra always told us that it’s so important to be experiential and not transactional. And I think that’s been something that’s been really core,” McGee said.

Before opening a permanent storefront in their hometown of San Francisco, McGee and Ashbaugh put Scott’s advice to the test by hosting a series of pop-up events. When it opens, their new space will bring together everything she recommended by operating as a coffee shop, a retail store, an office, a warehouse, and a design studio.

“We heard Kendra in the back of our heads say you cannot just make a store,” Ashbaugh said. It appears they took her words to heart.

—Amaya Nichole, News Writer

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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In February, Alamo Drafthouse—the theater chain known for its food and drink service, retro branding, and diverse film programming—started rolling out a major operational change. The brand phased out its on-paper food and drink ordering system for a QR code system that requires viewers to order from their phones. The move was designed to solve a host of operational problems for the brand’s employees and guests.

Then, the uproar began.

“This hurt more than, like, most of the breakups I’ve had,” Andy Young, a film and TV editor in Los Angeles, told The New York Times. The actor Elijah Wood tweeted that the new experience was “truly awful.” The Alamo Drafthouse subreddit exploded with backlash. Employees at one location in Denver held a strike to protest disruptions to their work. A Change.org petition, which now has over 10,000 signatures, emerged to call for a reversal of the new policy.

The vocal response was almost entirely negative—and it largely stems from the fact that the Alamo has long established itself as a distraction-free movie viewing space with its “Don’t Talk” marketing campaign. To many loyal fans, the Alamo was one of the last bastions of the phoneless world, and this new mobile ordering system represented the downfall of that ethos for a corporate check. 

Alamo Drafthouse’s executive leadership sees things differently. Multiple sources told Fast Company that, in many ways, Alamo’s previous operational design was broken—causing more interruptions for guests and more work for employees behind the scenes. The results of the new mobile ordering system, they say, simply don’t match up with the backlash: Alamo is having its best year for box office revenue since 2019, employees are netting higher take-home pay on average, and guests are placing more in-theater orders than ever before. 

“Alamo Drafthouse has always been focused on delivering the best moviegoing experience possible,” CEO Michael Kustermann says. “Technology has evolved, and we want to embrace the ability to evolve with it if it improves the cinematic experience. We believe it does.”

What’s happened

Alamo Drafthouse began in 1997 in Austin as the brainchild of Tim and Karrie League, a husband and wife team. The initial location showed specialty programming not available at other theaters, hosted themed events, reunion screenings, and director retrospectives, and served a limited in-house menu. Since then, Alamo has grown into an enterprise with around 40 locations nationwide, and it was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2024 for an estimated $200 million.

Today, the brand programs more films than any other circuit every year, still hosts events, and serves food and drinks (though now with a much more expansive menu). And, until recently, Alamo relied on a purely analog system to take customers’ orders. Viewers would look at physical menus placed at their seats, write their orders on a slip of paper, and use a call button to let employees know that their order was ready to be collected. At the end of the night, receipts were doled out by waiters and payment was collected from the aisles. 

Behind the scenes, though, Alamo had been working on a new mobile ordering system for years—one that uses a scannable QR code menu and digital ordering interface rather than pens, papers, and call buttons. The new system officially rolled out in February, and is now the standard across the company’s locations.

Why Alamo Drafthouse is in hot water with fans

It’s not difficult to see why Alamo’s new mobile ordering policy has ruffled so many feathers, considering how staunch the brand has been about preventing viewers from using their phones in the past. 

From its second month of operation to the present, the chain has invested in hundreds of “Don’t Talk” public service announcements (PSAs) informing viewers of its no talking or texting policy, assuring them that violators would be permanently banned from theaters. The people delivering the message varied—from Jamie Lee Curtis to Ryan Coogler—but the takeaway remained the same: Do not, under any circumstances, take your phone out during a movie. 

To be clear, phones were never actually banned in Alamo locations—in fact, it’s been standard protocol at many locations for years for guests to show waiters their digital tickets from their seats. Still, Alamo’s decades-long “Don’t Talk” campaign has undoubtedly caused guests to view Alamo theaters as phone-free spaces—and, for many fans, that meant that the new ordering system felt like a betrayal. 

One statement on the matter from the Austin Film Critics Association reads, “‘Don’t talk. Don’t text’ has been the Drafthouse’s mission statement since its earliest days as a single-screen cinema in Austin. Its growth into a national cinematic institution has been in no small part due to audiences knowing they can have a disturbance-free experience, and that staff will intervene to prevent the distraction of cellphone usage.” 

That sentiment is echoed by dozens of posts on the Alamo subreddit, many of which express a belief that the change reflects a broader loss of Alamo’s identity after its Sony acquisition. Under a post titled “Never coming back,” one commenter wrote, “Any business that’s remotely good in this capitalist hellscape will inevitably be bought up and ruined by one of 5 insatiable conglomerates (sorry ‘investment firms’ via the conglomerates they control) or else gradually succumb to enshittification on its own due to the endless compounding factors that are killing third spaces.”

In online discussion forums, horror stories about the rollout of the mobile ordering system abound. Alamo has said that it’s listening to feedback and working on some minor updates to the interface, like fixing bugs, updating the text message reminding guests to close their tab, increasing font size, and reordering the navigation. 

Broadly, though, sources at the company tell Fast Company that the online backlash against the new policy stands in stark contrast to in-theater results. 

Why Alamo scrapped pen and paper

As Alamo’s new mobile ordering system has rolled out, it seems as if the old pen-and-paper ordering system is being viewed through rose-colored glasses—when, in fact, that system came with its own host of problems. According to an Alamo spokesperson, the company has received complaints from fans for years about the design of its food delivery system.

To start, analog ordering meant that, any time a viewer pressed their call button for refills, silverware, napkins, or a dessert course, an employee would need to return to the theater and walk through the aisles in front of other guests to collect their paper. In order to apply add-ons like season pass discounts or loyalty rewards, guests would need to talk directly to a concierge or waiter. Then, during the third act of the film, employees had to print out and organize physical receipts for every seat and complete each transaction face-to-face—a process that often landed during the movie’s climax. 

“We’ve always innovated as much as we could around the paper, pen, and server model,” the spokesperson told Fast Company. “Our teams had to invent really complex and very manual order management systems—literally sorting paper—to balance their own capacity. They’d also have to do a last call check-in three-quarters of the way through the movie, and then a check drop often close to the climax—two distractions that guests didn’t love. Technology has enabled us to substantially improve the system to limit disruptions and increase operational efficiencies.” 

The new mobile ordering system is built to reduce the number of times that employees need to walk in front of guests during films as well as eliminate time-consuming receipt-printing processes behind the scenes. Now, employees are able to see all orders digitally and drop off refills and silverware in one stop, rather than making repeated runs through the theater to collect paper orders and again to deliver the items. Eventually, the spokesperson adds, guests will also be able to save favorite orders, order ahead, and schedule items throughout the film to better pace their experience. 

While some fans have raised concerns about how this new system might impact employees (especially after Sony’s 2024 acquisition led to a wave of layoffs), Alamo says that it hasn’t laid off any employees due to the QR rollout, and hourly workers are retaining their base wages. In fact, the spokesperson says that the system has allowed employees to manage high volumes of attendees more efficiently, contributing to higher average hourly take-home pay for the majority of workers.

And, despite the online backlash, mobile ordering doesn’t seem to have dented Alamo’s business results. Subscribers to Alamo’s season pass have jumped, and food and beverage orders are up since the new system rolled out. The spokesperson says any claims about guests constantly pulling out their phones during films are hyperbolic. The company’s data shows that 85% of orders are placed before the movie, and only 15% come during the run time.

Kustermann stresses that, ultimately, food and drink ordering is only one small part of Alamo’s business. He’s focused on maintaining the brand’s other core pillars—like its diverse film line-up, custom ad-free preshow, screening events, and annual festival—and, for those reasons, he says, “We need Alamo Drafthouse to be strong in an industry filled with volatility.”

It’s clear that mobile ordering has taken a toll on some fans’ perception of Alamo’s brand—but, ultimately, it might just be the right choice for the brand operationally.

“We believe it’s worth it because it makes our business model more sustainable, puts more money in the pockets of our hardworking hourly venue team members, and can create less distraction for our guests,” Kustermann says.