Boston Legoland Master Builder Megan Amaral is bridging the Lego gender gap, one brick at a time
“When girls come in, they see me in this position just building with Lego all day and I hope they're inspired to go for it."
Megan Amaral’s apartment is awash in finished Lego constructions. A big Millennium Falcon sits on display atop a table in the corner of the living room, while other structures, like a rendition of the Disney castle and Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, line the top shelf above the TV. If there’s an empty space to showcase a new build, she’ll fill it. The “loose brick that I have at home can [fill] a closet,” Amaral said. But she has at least four times that in her office at the Legoland Discovery Center Boston, where she works as a Master Model Builder. A Sturbridge native, Amaral is the only female Master Model Builder in North America. And out of 27 Discovery Center locations, each with a single master builder on staff, she’s one of three female builders worldwide.“I feel kind of like a celebrity,” she said of being one woman among so few. Nearly every day she said she invites guests into her office, which is filled with life-sized Lego animals among other displays, and every time someone has a daughter who’s “just as into Lego as maybe their brothers or anyone else,” she offers up her own story. “I always like to bring that up to be like, ‘Look, you could be the next female Master Model Builder when you grow up, because right now there’s only three of us in the world and you should go for it — keep building,’” Amaral said. “It’s really cool to be able to tell kids that and be that kind of role model.”She said most of her job involves building everything people see in the Boston Legoland attractions, and taking care of the Lego version of Boston, but another one of her roles is to empower girls to take on seemingly impossible positions within male-dominated fields.
The Lego version of Boston, a “mini land,” that Amaral maintains as a Master Model Builder.
“A lot of people see Lego as more of an engineering and a … mechanical type of toy,” Amaral said, adding that engineering has always been seen as a masculine career. “So bringing the female perspective into Lego, it’s harder only because they haven’t seen females working with Legos as much as they’ve seen males.”
Amaral said all builders have something unique they filter into their builds, and for her, it’s shading colors.
“A flamingo is not just one shade of pink, it’s two shades of pink and they have to work together,” she said. “I’m really good at the creative, organic shape, and colorful things.”
A red panda and flamingo, both part of a series of animals Amaral built for a partnership with the Franklin Park Zoo, rest in her office.
Cities in the basement
By age 5, after her first Lego set — a mini pizzeria with a truck and tiny pizzas to match — Amaral was hooked. As her aunt funded her hobby, later turned profession, she built whole cities in the basement.“Anytime I felt like being creative or if I saw a cool house, I tended to try and build it out of Lego,” Amaral said. When she left home, studying architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, she left her bricks, too. “I never brought Lego to college,” Amaral said. “I wasn’t sure how that would go over.” But she still thought about the endless creative possibilities. “I would come back on break, and try and build some of the stuff that we were designing in college,” Amaral said. Coming out with a bachelor’s in architecture, she said she landed a “real-world” job at a firm and worked there for a year before she heard about the Discovery Center. But to get her dream job, she had to compete in Lego’s Brickfactor competition — twice. When Amaral first tried for the job in January, 2014, she was eliminated in the final rounds. Come September, 2015, she’d spent hours practicing and won her spot as a master builder. Amaral said during both competitions there had only been one other woman to make it to the top 10 with her. Now that she’s secured her position, she stands as a role model showing kids what’s possible with perseverance, and introducing more women to the field to change the norm. “When girls come in, they see me in this position just building with Lego all day and I hope they’re inspired to go for it,” Amaral said. “If they’re asking, ‘How do I become a Master Model Builder?’ I tell them to go for those male-dominated topics.”Often, she said, the kids who walk into her office are filled with awe, a smile swells on their face and their owl eyes survey the room.
A corner of Amaral’s office where her loose bricks are organized and a Madagascar butterfly, a Grinch head, a Fenway park sign and a Lego version of the Franklin Park Zoo’s baby gorilla, Azize, line the shelves.
“My favorite are the kids who come in and are just speechless,” Amaral said. “They literally stand in the middle of my office with their eyes wide open just kind of looking around.”
It’s those moments that she remembers.
“Just watching them have that wonder and inspiration,” Amaral said. “You can see their brains already working, like, ‘I could build that!’”
And she wants everyone to have the chance to build.
“I think that Lego bricks are a great equalizer in general because every kid can jump into a pile of bricks and start building something,” she said. “Everyone has different strengths, and we bring it all together and you can build these amazing things whether you’re boys or girls, or from different parts of the world.”
Legos, she said, are something that bring people together.
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