Issue 04
Block Heads
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By LEGO
The memo comes in from headquarters, and Steve Gerling has a new assignment: build a four-foot statue of breakfast kingpin Cap’n Crunch out of LEGO. Gerling is a trained fine-art sculptor, and has the fatherly, fussy bearing of so many endearing New England Yankee men. He is the kind of man with the proper demeanor required to build an absolutely flawless cabinet.
From nine to five, Gerling is a LEGO master builder, operating out of the LEGO company complex in Enfield, a tiny town in the anomalous plains of Connecticut dominated by decrepit drying barns and fields of tobacco leaves destined to become cigar wrappers. Gerling’s mission, which he shares with three other master builders, is to create great and inspiring things from LEGO bricks: a lifelike octopus, skateboarder Bob Burnquist, a bust of NBC weather icon Al Roker, or scale replicas of Fenway Park and the White House.
Today, Gerling is in the initial design stages for the good Cap’n Crunch, working from a cereal box adorned with its namesake’s mug. The front of the Cap’n is easy enough, and champion breakfaster Quaker has made some action figures for the rest of the body. Gerling draws the Cap’n from various angles and feeds them all into a 3-D rendering program. The Cap’n appears on screen in 3-D computer space, trippy and fresh in and of itself. Then Gerling enters his desired height of four feet, and pushes a button every computer should have: LEGOIZE. The Cap’n’s surface bubbles out into the crenellated surface of a LEGO sculpture. He explains that “this program isn’t completely perfect, it only uses one size of brick, the common one that we call the 2×4. But it does give a layerby- layer sense of how to build the structure, and it cuts down the amount of time involved in building it by at least half.” More time, of course, means more great and inspiring things made of LEGO. Contrary to the assumption that many children make, it isn’t against the rules to glue LEGO pieces together … the official model-builders do it all the time. Glue does imply a certain sense of permanence, however, and demands that the sculptures be well planned out beforehand. The larger LEGO sculptures are frequently built around a metal armature.
While Gerling contemplates the Cap’n, master builder Erik Varszegi is in another room, completely bleary-eyed, having willingly pulled an all-nighter working on an astonishingly detailed 10-foot-long Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars that he just couldn’t bring himself to leave overnight.
Young children’s play sessions with LEGO frequently exceed an hour or two, far longer than with other toys and games. The company finds it difficult to photograph children for their marketing while they play with the colorful bricks: kids don’t photogenically smile while they are building a LEGO creation; their faces are too focused, concentrated, and intent. Last night, Varszegi showed what can happen when you couple an adult attention span, LEGO, and a paycheck.
The LEGO master builder team is but a small fraction-albeit the official one-of the many people who use LEGO bricks as a part of their livelihood. All over the world, scores of educators use LEGO for teaching and research, both with and without LEGO company sponsorship. There are unofficial books of LEGO Bible stories, engineers using LEGO to test products and designs, and (should this surprise anyone?) gross-out LEGO porn on the Internet. There are countless perfectly-scaled LEGO models, made by fans and sold informally, of every Star Wars vehicle and beast, as well as human-sized Simpsons characters. There are LEGO versions of many popular films. There are LEGO dioramas on the Internet that depict methods of torture and unfortunate ways to die.
LEGO is a well-explored medium.
Originally developed in 1949 as “Automatic Binding Bricks,” LEGO bricks rose to be one of Fortune magazine’s “Products of the Century.” Over the past 50-plus years, the bricks and pieces have become a shared experience of nearly every American or European under the age of 40, as well as those elders that raised them. Based in Billund, Denmark, LEGO is one of the last privatelyowned global corporations, held by the Christiansen family since its inception in 1932. The name LEGO is an abbreviated version of the Danish verb “to play well” and, by sheer coincidence, means “I put together” in Latin.
LEGO bricks begin as bright granules of plastic, fed through pipes to molding machines, which melt the granules at temperatures over 400¼ F. The plastic goo is then molded into shape as a piece of LEGO, cooled, and sent on its way. Some pieces, such as axles or people, require additional assembly or decoration.
From there, the many bits and pieces head off to be grouped into sets and boxed for retailing. The packaging machines are a special feat, able to collect hundreds of pieces at a time with perfect precision. This may not seem especially impressive, but the stakes are high: miss a single tiny brick in a single box of the 714-piece dinosaur set, for instance, and some unfortunate child won’t be able to build the brontosaurus on the box cover; crying will ensue, since the emotional immaturity of a seven-year-old leaves little room for failure … if LEGO screws up, there’s no God. Fortunately, these machines are phenomenally accurate.
Many a child has dreamt of the world’s biggest LEGO set, and to make that dream real the company opened their LEGOland theme park in Denmark in 1968, followed by parks in California, England, and Germany. A walk through one of the parks is a knobbly plastic world tour of marvels: Mount Rushmore, life-sized elephants, the Acropolis, a bust of Einstein, and so on. LEGO burglars climb out of windows, while LEGO police are there to catch them. Each sculpture is a significant time investment: a life-sized bust of a human head, for example, normally takes between 40 and 60 hours to build. Remarkably, the bricks last, even in the California sun and English rain; LEGO bricks might not immediately seem like a medium for outdoor sculpture, but they hold up fairly well against the elements, though their color fades after about five years.
The company gives a little test to prospective model builders who aspire to make the sculptures at the LEGOland parks or to hold positions such as Gerling’s: out of the regular, right-angled bricks, build a hollow sphere. While it sounds simple enough, the task in practice is enough to weed out a number of applicants. With LEGO’s abundance of right angles, it can be maddeningly difficult to use it to build a convincing curve. As a medium, LEGO is a paradoxical combination of endless possibilities and severe limitations.
Of course, a pain in the rear to some is a call to action for others. A great number of today’s engineers, architects, artists, and inventors were LEGO maniacs as children, and in some cases never stopped fiending. Prize-winning inventor Saul Griffith works in robotics, electronics, and, sometimes, little plastic bricks: “I do pretty serious engineering, and I prototype a lot with LEGO.” The small bricks also hack fairly easily, with engineers frequently melting, sawing, and modifying them. Griffith, saying that he “wanted to take the hard edge off of LEGO, to build the skeleton of the dinosaur out of LEGO and the soft skin of the dinosaur out of rubber,” even created LUGO, a flexible rubber brick system that would be compatible with LEGO.
Griffith is but one of several alumni of the MIT Media Lab, a research hub that features the company-sponsored “LEGO Learning Laboratory.” The MIT Media Lab was home to the first two LEGO Professors of Learning Research, Dr. Seymour Papert and Dr. Mitchel Resnick. The two professors were among the first to envision putting a computer chip inside a LEGO brick in order to bring robotics and LEGO together. Eventually, this led to LEGO’s Mindstorm line, which allowed for the creation of, among other things, LEGO cars that could sense a curve in a road and respond to it appropriately. Though MIT Media Lab researchers frequently use LEGO to create new, useful, or funny things, they do so within their larger research context of informal learning … like one would find in a LEGO play session.
LEGO is too good and too familiar of a product not to use for teaching, but this mix of utility and ubiquity sometimes puts educators in a tough spot. Karen Wilkenson and Mike Petrich are leaders in the field of informal learning, teaching a mix of art and engineering at San Francisco’s science and discovery museum, the Exploratorium. Wilkenson recalls an experiment with a workshop of theirs at the Exploratorium: “Using words like LEGO in the workshop description brought in all boys. But the same workshop, advertised as ‘creative expression,’ brings in almost all girls.” They find LEGO impossible to avoid: Wilkenson says that the two “joke about being very LEGO-dependent,” while Petrich says that they “try to run the opposite direction from LEGO.”
The bricks as objects aren’t explicitly gendered, yet the name LEGO certainly seems to be. Even today, some products in the LEGO line, such as the “City” offerings, are advertised specifically as “for boys.” By company estimate, boys and girls use LEGO about equally prior to age five in the United States. After their fifth birthdays, for whatever reason we choose to believe, girls comprise only 4% of LEGO users. It would be ridiculous to assume that the company willingly gives up half its customer base, but at the same time, LEGO’s branding continues to be a barrier to entry for most girls.
For a number of reasons, the LEGO Company has had a bad time of it in recent years. The Internet and video games have taken a toll on the hands-on toy market as a whole. In Denmark, where LEGO means many thousands of jobs, the company has sparked fears and outcry as they consider transferring fabrication of the plastic pieces away from expensive Danish labor and toward China. Several of the key patents to LEGO bricks have expired. LEGOland is for sale. All of this may be the case, but such concerns tend to vanish with a big mess of the clickitty bright bricks within arm’s reach.
Melinda Carter of the LEGO public relations department was kind enough to grease the wheels of journalism by giving me a few boxes of product, and in the spirit of research, I tuned my radio to the baseball game and opened the dinosaur kit. It had been a while, maybe a decade, since I’d “played legos.” I later learned that LEGO, in all capital letters-always-is actually a noun that carries no plural, so if one is to be a company stickler, one can’t “play legos.”
Worries about plural corporate nouns, however, were about the last thing on my mind. There were a lot of worries-grown-up stuff-that seemed to vanish as soon as I opened the big, yellow box: I was going to play legos. Melinda had told me that “there are two types of people who play with LEGO: the ones who build the project shown on the box and then put it on their shelf to look at, and the people who throw out the box and instructions and build whatever they want.” Having always been a kid who would throw out the suggested activities without so much as glancing at them (”we like that kind,” said Melinda), this evening I set to work to build a Freshosaur, the likes of which the world had never seen before.
I dumped the box’s contents into a cake pan and happily and slowly ran my fingers through the 714 red, burgundy, and cream pieces of all shapes and sizes. In the onomatopoetically precise German language, there’s even a word for the distinctive LEGOrummaging noise: gruschteling. I put the familiar pieces together slowly, meditatively, and before I knew it, three hours had passed, and the baseball game had come and gone. The nostalgic murmur of the Fenway crowd through the radio had mixed with the equally nostalgic gruschteling, and I soon had myself a Freshosaur. LEGO might be an art medium, an engineering aid, or an educational tool, but there is no better way to find it at its best than to dump a mess of it all over the floor and have yourself a play.