The Vesuvius Challenge, a global initiative co-founded by Nat Friedman to unlock the secrets of carbonised ancient scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, came to Belle-Ve Bricks with a commission as ambitious as the challenge itself.
They wanted a custom brick model of the Villa dei Papiri, the ancient Roman villa near Herculaneum where thousands of papyrus scrolls were buried, to be used as a prize for competition winners. The model needed to be fully buildable, packaged in a custom designed and printed box with them all to be shipped to the US.
The Challenge
The Villa dei Papiri is not a simple subject. Translating the sprawling classical architecture of an ancient Roman estate into a buildable, display-worthy brick model required careful design decisions at every scale.
The model was built on a 48×96 stud footprint, making it one of the larger architectural commissions at the time that we had taken on.
The client wanted us to supply 15 sets of this model, each set needed to be presented in a custom-designed, fully printed box produced to a high standard, we needed to design a large, high quality boxes for this project.
What We Delivered
The model ended up being 107cm x 48cm x 27cm (h x d x w), made from over 5000 pieces!
It was a big model which meant we could include a lot of detail. We designed the base of the model in sections that all connected together using technic pins, this gave a really solid base to build the rest of the model on.
We worked closely with the client to ensure the details were as close to the real Villa as possible, the end result was amazing!
10 complete Villa dei Papiri brick model kits were produced, each in its own custom-printed presentation box with QR code cards included.
All parts were counted three times individually, bagged by colour and type, weighed separately, and packed with spare parts included. The finished sets then needed to ship internationally to two US destinations under time pressure.
The shipment was split across two UPS dispatches to two separate US addresses. Both shipments were tracked and managed by us end to end, including customs coordination to ensure their order was delivered without any issues.
Nat Friedman and Stephen Parsons at the Vesuvius Challenge began building their sets on arrival and fed back directly to us throughout the process, the clients team were supportive throughout the whole project which made the collaboration such a fun one to be part of!
This project sat at the intersection of history, science, and design, which is a rare brief to receive. The Vesuvius Challenge exists to recover lost knowledge from antiquity, and the Villa dei Papiri is the physical place where that knowledge was buried.
Building it in brick form gave prize winners something tangible and meaningful that connected them to the mission. Getting the model, the packaging, and the logistics right under a tight timeline required close coordination across design, production, and shipping, and the end result was a prize worthy of the competition.
We were priveledged to be part of this project and happy that we were able to bring value to a competition that could unlock so many untold secrets within history.
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//TODO: Break this file down so that we can actually unit test it.
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/**
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window.LIRenderAll = function () {
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BADGE_NAMES = '.LI-profile-badge, .LI-entity-badge',
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responsesReceived = 0, //Keeps track of number of responses recieved for proper cleanup when finished
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