THE ART OF THE BRICK

    The Art of the Brick is currently on at the Boiler House in Brick Lane (well, it had to be). 

    All the exhibits are by Nathan Sawaya, an American artist who makes sculptures and mosaics from standard Lego building bricks. That's his self-portrait above.

 

    I got my first Lego set at the ripe old age of twenty. It was a huge box, which would cost around £500 today, won by my dad who came closest to guessing the number of bricks in a large Lego ocean liner. He was brilliant at judging dimensions and always claimed he'd actually worked it out. The bricks were earmarked for a young cousin but, before then, this big kid spent many hours playing with them to 'make sure they all fitted together' despite the fact every Lego piece is famously engineered to within a tolerance of twenty micrometres (0.0007874016 inches).

    Nathan used 80,020 bricks for the dinosaur. I wonder how many he stood on?

   The exhibition continues until August 4.

Lego trivia:

On average, every human owns 86 Lego bricks. All the bricks sold in one year would girdle the earth five times.

The trade name is derived from "leg godt", Danish for "play well". Coincidentally, in Latin, lego means "I put together".

Lego was originally based on Kiddicraft, invented by English toymaker Hilary Page.

A single Lego brick can support the weight of 373,000 other bricks.

     In 2021 you could actually buy this real pistol in the USA:

       Culper Precision said its Glock weapon was developed to "highlight the pure enjoyment of the shooting sports".  It was quickly withdrawn from their catalogue following demands from Lego.