Jared Oswald builds with LEGO, but he does not treat it as a novelty, a toy, or even a gimmick. For him, it is a medium—one capable of architectural rigor, emotional resonance, and quiet conceptual play. Working under the studio name Life In Pieces, Oswald has developed a highly specific practice centered on large-scale, high-fidelity LEGO reconstructions of buildings, often ones laden with history, institutional meaning, or personal attachment. His latest work, a 92,000-piece model of the Jewish Chapel at the United States Military Academy at West Point, now permanently installed on campus, exemplifies the seriousness of his approach—but it is only one chapter in a body of work that has been steadily evolving from commercial craft into something closer to architectural portraiture.
Oswald’s relationship to LEGO stretches back to childhood. Growing up in Poughkeepsie, he was the kid who dutifully assembled sets according to the instructions, only to dismantle them immediately and feed the pieces into an ever-growing bin of parts. From there, he would build whatever came next—an instinct that foreshadowed both his comfort with structure and his resistance to fixed outcomes. That habit never really left. What changed, over time, was his understanding of what LEGO could be used to express.
For years, Oswald’s work lived primarily in the commercial realm. He ran a parts shop, took on commissions, and treated LEGO as a means of making precise, often impressive objects for clients. It was only more recently that he began to see the medium less as a technical exercise and more as a conceptual language. “I found the artistic side of this almost backward,” he says. “It really wasn’t until later that I found it more as a way to express ideas instead of just to recreate something.”
Cast Iron Building
Architecture became the natural subject. Oswald is drawn to buildings not simply for their forms, but for what they hold: memory, ritual, labor, and community. A building, unlike a sculpture or a figure, is something people inhabit. It carries both public meaning and private experience. His LEGO models aim to capture that duality—what a structure looks like, and what it feels like to know it well.
A turning point came during the pandemic, when Oswald briefly pursued a career in real estate while continuing to grow his LEGO practice. That overlap led to one of his earliest large-scale architectural works: a four-foot-long LEGO model of Poughkeepsie’s Cast Iron Building, commissioned by CR Properties as the structure gained historic designation. The finished piece was unveiled as a surprise to the building’s owner, who first encountered it installed in the window. For Oswald, the project served as proof of concept. It demonstrated not only what he could build, but how architectural LEGO work could function as celebration, documentation, and art all at once.
Since then, Oswald’s career has split between two tracks. On one side is his personal studio practice under Life In Pieces. On the other is his role as COO of Playwell Bricks, a company specializing in large-scale LEGO design, educational builds, and corporate collaborations. That work has brought him into contact with Fortune 500 companies and high-profile clients, many of whom remain unnamed due to nondisclosure agreements. Among the projects he can share is a custom LEGO gift set designed for AMD, now part of the company’s marketing efforts.
The NDA-heavy nature of that commercial work has shaped how Oswald presents himself publicly. Much of what appears on his website consists of personal projects or commissions he is free to document—objects that function as artistic statements as much as portfolio pieces. “Unless somebody sees one of these large buildings,” he says, “it’s kind of hard for people to imagine the detail level and everything that you can get unless they really see it in person.”
Detail is central to Oswald’s practice, especially the kind that most viewers will never notice. Interiors are fully articulated. Staircases lead somewhere. Offices contain tiny, personalized artifacts. In the West Point synagogue model, Oswald recreated the building exactly as it existed in 2023, down to the spiral staircase, the alumni gallery, and a chaplain’s office that includes a miniature LEGO Hogwarts castle—a nod to a real object that once sat on the chaplain’s desk. These hidden fidelities, Oswald says, are mostly for himself. But if someone happens to notice one, “it’s going to make their day.”
The West Point project began in 2023, when Oswald received an email from the Jewish Chapel’s chaplain proposing a LEGO model of the building. What started as a loosely defined idea quickly grew in ambition. After touring the site and producing early digital drafts, Oswald and his collaborators settled on a much larger scale than initially planned. The result was a two-year project: nearly a year of digital design and approvals, followed by fabrication and assembly.
The finished model comprises 91,933 LEGO elements and measures more than six feet long. To manage both transport and the physical realities of LEGO tolerances—small variations that compound at scale—Oswald designed the building as 62 independent sections. Those sections were transported to West Point and assembled on site. The final piece now sits in the chapel’s entryway under a custom display case, with removable roof sections that allow the interior to be revealed during holidays and campus tours.
Alongside these monumental commissions, Oswald has been developing a more explicitly conceptual body of work: a series of “Micro Cities” that use architecture as allegory. The idea originated with Autumn’s Fire, a floating city model he designed as the centerpiece for his wedding. Rendered in dark blue and gold, the piece imagines a built environment in harmony with nature rather than in opposition to it. Across a series of related forms—from city to auxiliary structure to cake topper—the artificial and the natural gradually merge into a single object.
Oswald has drafts for roughly 25 of these micro cities, each exploring a different idea through architectural form. They are slower, more personal projects, made in the margins of a career that often demands the impossible on tight timelines. “If you’re an artist and you feel like you’re humming along,” he says, “you’re probably missing something.”
For now, Oswald is trying to give himself more space for that unresolved work—without losing his appetite for challenge. He still fields commission requests daily, though he has raised his minimum threshold and become more selective. He still finds it difficult to say no to a project that seems impossible. And he still dreams of future builds, including an ambitious recreation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a building he finds both architecturally and culturally irresistible.
