Her domino designs were featured in the acclaimed documentary “Lily Topples the World” (2021) and her personal YouTube channel Hevesh5 has over 1.8 billion views and four million subscribers.
This week, Lily Hevesh hosts “Destination Domino” at the National Building Museum in D.C. now through Saturday.
“I started building dominoes when I was nine years old and at this point it’s been 15 years,” Hevesh told WTOP. “It’s really a great partnership because we’re all about building, designing and toppling, and the museum is literally called the National Building Museum.”
The Boston native arrived in D.C. a week ago, bringing with her 130,000 dominoes in color-coded plastic cases. She prefers to use her own brand of dominoes called H5, which she said are perfect for building objects and designing topple sequences.
“Typical dominoes usually have dots and they’re more rounded, so they’re not good for the building of structures,” Hevesh said.
“H5 domino creations are more precise, so they’re perfect 2-by-1 ratios and every single domino is alike, so you can build them super tall, they come in all different colors, no dots, and we have a special surface texture so when they topple over they’re not gonna slide out like a lot of game dominoes will.”
For the past week, she and her team of fellow YouTube domino wizards have been gradually building elaborate designs on a special dance-floor material to keep them steady.
“We need somewhat of a hard, flat surface,” Hevesh said. “Carpet isn’t good for building dominoes, it needs to be really hard, so underneath we have these tiles, they’re hard surfaces like puzzle pieces, then we lay out the dance-floor surface on top and let it sit for a couple of days so the air bubbles can go away and we can really flatten it.”
On one side of the museum is a giant floor design that will topple on Saturday at 5 p.m.
“We’re doing 100,000 pieces,” Hevesh said.
“In the center we’re going to make a giant spiral that is going to go outwards in a whole bunch of colors, we have the D.C. skyline, we have the National Building Museum built in dominoes. … You’ll see a giant mosaic of the Mona Lisa, it’s gonna all come crashing down. There’s a row of dominoes on the top that will trigger each line, so it’ll all just crumble like cascading waves, mostly at once.”
On the other side of the museum is a tall domino tower hoping to break the world record.
“The National Building Museum is the perfect place to build this tower because no other building is high enough,” Hevesh said.
“This one will be about 8,000 dominoes and roughly 34 feet if we can break the record. We’re up on scissor lifts and it’s a little difficult because you don’t know if the dominoes are going to be leaning or if there’s airflow in here that can knock it down by accident, but we do have time to rebuild it multiple times if needed.”
Meanwhile, kids are encouraged to try their hand at their own domino creations.
Philadelphia resident Gregory Wikoff brought his domino-obsessed son, Charles.
“It was on his list of things to do, so we combined it with an Orioles game last night and a trip to the National Building Museum today,” Wikoff said.
“He’s never been all that interested in sports. … He’s kind of a domino-obsessed kid plus a budding entrepreneur. He’s always building stuff around our house in our dining room, crazy things, videotapes them, he’s got a YouTube channel, so he’s in his element here. … I’ve never seen him this happy.”
Young Charles said it was Hevesh who inspired him to pursue dominoes in the first place.
“She’s what got me into dominoes,” Charles said. “Someday, I’m gonna be working on something like the amazing thing they’re working on back there.”
Northern Virginia residents Mechelle and Ricky Allen brought their grandkids down from New Jersey.
“I run in the annual Cherry Blossom 10-miler and this is where we come to pick up our packets, so I knew this was here and I knew my grandson loves to build stuff, so I figured, why not take them here?” Ricky said. “I love building, so coming here, yeah, it’s for the kids, but I wanted to come myself. I wanted to be here myself. I love architecture.”
“All of the colors and the different pieces that the kids can manipulate,” Mechelle said. “They see something already made and they find it fascinating, so they run over to their dominoes or Legos and said, ‘I can do that!'”
Turns out, they also happen to be huge fans of WTOP.
“WTOP is our favorite station, it’s the place you want to be for Traffic and Weather on the 8’s,” Mechelle said.
“You find a lane and you stick with it,'” Ricky said, quoting the WTOP Traffic Center.
Together, we invented a brand new catchphrase.
“Traffic, Weather and Dominoes on the 8’s!” they joked.
