I disagree, the lego set is for him to doodle ideas. He is extremly good doing realistic renders but those take a lot of time so giving him something to doodle with while playing and not going blind for staying so many hours in front of his PC is, imo a cool gift. Its also meant to be kind of a joke like "Ok now that you have a title you can start building houses in the real world, here you go *Box of Legos*". Your other ideas are good ones too. Here is one of his renders: It really looks like the one in the lego box
In my personal experience, the architects I know love LEGO - tho they actually prefer the actual sets of buildings rather than freeform sets like this one linked. They have said they get to do enough freeform stuff in their real work that sometimes they like a bit of "instruction." That said, it's not particularly useful if one is hoping to actually be productive as an architect: "Somehow, everything we produced had a decidedly 1970s feel, a look formed by both the number of chamfered blocks in the set, and the inescapable desire to make everything symmetrical as you stack floor upon floor. Details are added, and bits extended with impossible cantilevers, until you realise the table is full of things that recall the megastructures of the Japanese metabolist movement crossed with the autocratic monuments of Pyongyang. Or maybe that was just us. In the end, we cut our losses and piled everything up into one gigantic totem pole, sprouting helipads and dripping with skygardens in a way the oligarchs of Knightsbridge could only dream of. None of which, we concluded, would we have come up with without the Lego. But nor did it feel like it encouraged any architectural investigation – just an exploration of form, at a particular scale encouraged by the proportions of the blocks, there being an inclination to build at what you generally think of as Lego scale. Far from being a quick way to throw together an idea, building with Lego is a laborious process of sifting through to find the right piece. And it’s an even bigger pain to take bits apart without destroying your entire creation. It leads to a kind of preciousness, the sharp, white precision of the pieces somehow at odds with the idea of rough-and-ready sketch-modelling. It all felt limiting, in comparison to what could be achieved in half the time with polystyrene foam and a hot wire, the staple of most architecture practices; or with digital software and a 3D printer. Still, the kit will no doubt be enthusiastically adopted by aafols (adult architect fans of Lego) to make ornamental models of their own buildings with which to line the shelves of their offices. After all, nothing tells your clients you’re a crazy creative funster like a Lego architecture model." Source: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/aug/06/lego-architecture-studio-could-it-be-useful
Well thats true but i didnt think the point of the present to be a tool for work but a toy with reference to his work which may inspire ideas. Plus is LEGO, LEGO is never a bad present. I checked all the Architecture sets and the big ones are out of my budget and the small ones are pretty but once finished they would probably end becoming shelf decoration
