Images: How this gay man's passion for LEGO won him a place of honor in Dulles Airport

Dulles International Airport in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., has long held a special place in D.C. gay man Richard Paules’s heart. Now he has a place in the airport.

The airport acquired a model that Paules created from LEGO bricks. It’s on permanent exhibit in the main terminal at Dulles — in the public area of the terminal, before passengers go through security, so it’s available to a wide audience.

“Dulles was the first airport I ever flew out of,” says Paules. He was 13, and an aunt took him to London, a trip that “just so opened my eyes about the world,” he says.

He was already a LEGO enthusiast. (By the way, LEGO is an abbreviated combination of two Danish words, “leg godt,” meaning “play well,” and according to the company, the name should be displayed in all capital letters.) He had inherited LEGO sets from his uncles when he was a child.

“As a kid, LEGOs were a way for me to express myself artistically but also definitely a way to sort of escape a little bit and a way to decompress,” he recalls. “There’s so much pressure to like the things you’re supposed to like, and I didn’t like baseball. I wasn’t very athletic, but I was very good at this.”

His love of LEGO building continued into his adulthood, and after creating many other notable models (more about them below), and he decided to combine it with his love of Dulles.

“I so love Dulles,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by it, and I so wanted to challenge myself to do a modern building, a modernist building. Dulles is so unlike any almost other building, with that big unsupported roof, and I really, really challenged myself to figure out how I could do that in LEGOs.”

It took him about six months to build the model, working after hours from his day job as a landscape designer. “I built it for fun, and then Dulles happened to buy it,” he says.

How that happened: “My wonderful friend Scott Cooper, who happens to work for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, saw it on my Instagram, and immediately he asked his higher-ups and advocated for me, said you need to see this, you need to acquire this. They couldn’t believe that I had done it, that it was actually LEGOs.”

It didn’t take much to convince them, Paules notes. “It’s amazing how fast it all came together,” he says. It went up in the terminal in January.

Among the other LEGO models Paules has created are the White House, the U.S. Capitol, a Renaissance-era castle, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in D.C., and the Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco. The latter two were commissioned by those institutions. He’s recently received a commission to re-create Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia as it was when the Founding Fathers met there in the First Continental Congress in 1774. He’s thinking about doing a model of D.C.’s Reagan National Airport and the “ambitious project” of making a microscale map of the capital city with LEGOs.

LEGO has also played a role in his romantic life. “My wonderful partner, we actually met after a friend set us up, and I found out later, one of the pictures he sent him was of me doing my LEGO models, and Thomas, my partner, said he was instantly in love,” Paules says. They’ve been together three years.

“He loves LEGOs as well,” Paules notes. “He’s an instruction follower, and I’m a freestyle builder, so we get along great.”

Paules has found many other LGBTQ+ LEGO fans, including some he’s met at the annual BrickFair LEGO Expo at the Dulles Expo Center. “People just love my work and love that I’m doing this, and I think it brings out a lot of nostalgia for them,” he says. “We have a lot of shared experiences in the queer community” — like his of being an unathletic kid who took joy in expressing himself through LEGOs.

He likens coming out of the LEGO closet to coming out of the gay closet — there’s some stigma around being an adult who builds with LEGOs. “I just hope that everybody in the LGBTQ community is true to themselves and expresses themselves how they want to, and they’re never afraid to express their creativity, no matter how nerdy it may be,” he says.