A LEGO Brickumentary Page #8
you are now members
of the Guinness World Records family.
I'd like to present this certificate
and congratulate all of you.
- Yes!
- We broke the record.
In Melbourne,
Steve Sammartino and Raul Oaida
built a working car
almost entirely out of LEGO bricks.
It's not going to set
any land speed records,
and it doesn't go all that far,
but just the mere fact that
it does go is quite something.
Andrew Carol, an engineer at Apple,
studied the remnants of a Greek device
used to determine celestial events,
which was found at the bottom
of the Aegean Sea.
Then he reconstructed it from,
At conventions, fans get together
to build great ball contraptions,
or GBCs, which deliver balls
from one module to another.
The GBC is a collaborative effort
to make a kinetic sculpture,
if you will.
In this case, if you watch,
when this ball hits, two flip off.
And they're timed
so that this gate double flips.
Even Google's Larry Page
used LEGO bricks.
Actually, in college I built
an inkjet printer out of LEGOs.
Page and Sergey Brin even built
their first server out of LEGO bricks.
decided to build an entire working house
out of LEGO bricks.
So, the LEGO system can enable people
to make real, working stuff.
Sometimes, however,
the goal is more cerebral.
What do you think that is?
How great is that?
You going to take a picture
with your cell phone?
Well, I didn't see it at first.
My sister pointed it out to me.
And I'm a preschool teacher,
and I am drawn to LEGOs.
I'm from Indiana, we don't see
things like that in Indiana.
So, it's unusual.
People are so familiar with LEGO bricks.
Most everyone you know
has snapped a few bricks together,
and so that makes the art accessible,
it makes it relatable.
When I first started
going to galleries and saying,
"Hey, I do LEGO art."
They kind of looked at me and said,
"Oh, okay, is that cars
and trucks or castles?"
You know, they have a set notion
of what LEGO art would be.
I order tens of thousands
of bricks every month.
This is how it is.
This is how I get my bricks.
In fact, I spend over
six figures annually just on LEGO.
There's probably
3 million bricks in this room.
I've made a career from a child's toy.
I've been told at times I'm a sellout
because I use this
commercial brand to create my art.
But it's a brand that I chose
because I believe
there's nothing I can't build out of it.
Growing up, I had a lot
of LEGO bricks as a toy.
It was something my parents encouraged.
They let me have a 36-square-foot
LEGO city in our living room.
It was when I was about 10 years old,
wanted to get a dog.
Asked my parents, "Can I get a dog?"
"No, you're not getting a dog."
I tore down my LEGO city,
used those bricks to create
my own life-size LEGO dog.
It was really my first time in realizing
it's not what's on the front of the box.
You can actually create whatever
you want out of this toy.
I got out of college, and I had
societal pressures to get a real job.
And I ended up going to law school.
I was doing corporate law.
And I would come home at the end of the
day and I would need a creative outlet.
And sometimes that was drawing,
sometimes it was painting.
But once I started
doing sculptures out of LEGO,
I really had found my passion.
And it got to the point where I was
working full days at the law firm,
and I would come home at night and have
a slate of commissions to work on.
And I decided to make that change,
to leave the law practice
behind, and go be an artist.
An artist who plays with toys.
You know, I don't know if this is...
if I've broken through.
I don't know if an artist ever can feel
like they've broken through
because I keep setting
bigger and bigger goals.
Nathan has been offered
his biggest opportunity yet.
He's been booked for a one-man show
in New York's Times Square
and is prepping over
a hundred pieces for it.
The New York exhibition, I think,
will be the biggest show of my life,
a culmination of years' worth of work,
as well as the largest
solo LEGO art exhibition ever.
And there's a lot of pressure.
The show will feature
Nathan's original creations
as well as LEGO replicas
he is making of classical works of art.
For Nathan, this is the opportunity
to prove himself as a legitimate artist.
I'm worried that the venue
that's taking a big risk on me
feels like this is a failure.
I'm worried that, you know,
will they actually get it
when they see it
in the exhibition format?
And really, what's
the public going to think?
Thousands of miles away in Germany
another artist, Jan Vormann,
has taken LEGO arts to the streets.
I really like to work with objects that
everybody has a preconceived image of.
The good thing with playful
elements in the work is that
people get attracted by it
rather than repulsed.
If I use a material which people like,
they are more likely to start
interacting with me.
So now it has different aspects to it.
On the one side,
the sculpture installation,
where it's just there
to be visually perceived.
And on the other side,
a performance kind of action.
It looks like a lot of fun,
but Jan's work has serious undertones.
Most of the times
I tried to find locations
which have a kind
of historical background
or political meaning.
Today we are here in the very back
of the Anhalter Bahnhof.
This used to be the main
train station for Berlin.
This is also a place where a lot of Jews
were deported before the war ended.
The Holocaust is an event
that's omnipresent in my mind,
so I think about it a lot.
You don't necessarily see it in my work,
because I don't want to add like,
visually dark and heavy subjects.
So my idea to use
the plastic construction bricks
was to add a kind of colorful
part of contemporary times,
a material that everybody
worldwide has the same feeling on it.
Some people call this type of art
"EGO bombing,"
but Jan prefers to call it "patchwork,"
and he's bringing the patchwork project
around the world.
For me, it's a kind of hopeful thing
to see that we actually share
this common culture.
Whoa...
Okay. What happens when
the thing you want to build
isn't the thing that you
want to build but rather
a representation of the thing
that you want to build?
Okay, I think I just confused myself.
What if the thing you
want to build is just an idea?
Could LEGO bricks be used for that?
In Denmark, when a rising architect wanted
to submit for a major commission,
he looked at how modular
building techniques
had become in his home country
and thought of his favorite toy
as a child.
In Denmark, because of the labor wages
and because of the bad weather,
you want to minimize the time
at the construction site.
So everything has to be
like prefabricated elements,
put together in interesting ways.
So in a manner of speaking,
Denmark has become
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"A LEGO Brickumentary" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2025. Web. 14 Jan. 2025. <https://www.scripts.com/script/a_lego_brickumentary_1945>.
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