LEGO (8 page)

The buzzer on our doorbell sounds, and I look up at the front door guiltily. I can sacrifice the last forty minutes of sorting and quickly dump all the LEGO pieces back into the plastic tub, or I can open the front door and hope whoever it is doesn’t have to come inside. I don’t want to have to re-sort, so I walk the twelve steps to our front door. It’s Edward, our air-conditioner repair man, ready to take a look at the leak in our basement. I encourage him to come in and lead him through my office on the right, hoping he doesn’t notice the pile on the ottoman.

I forget that my desk is overgrown with a dozen Tupperware bins filled with LEGO bricks. A giant yellow shopping bag with a bright red LEGO logo rests on the adjacent file cabinet. I shouldn’t have worried about the mess in the living room. I suddenly wish for the crying of a small child or a babysitter calling with an update—anything that would suggest to this stranger that my LEGO collection actually belongs to my kid. No rescue will come. My wife and I clearly don’t have children, and based on my appearance, it’s a good bet that I don’t even have a job.

“The basement is this way,” I mutter, because I don’t know yet how to tell a complete stranger that I’m an adult fan of LEGO.

If not better, at least bigger. Here is the biplane I created after turning to Joe Meno for inspiration.

Sorting isn’t fun, unless you’re my wife. Kate finds satisfaction in organization and detail. I view details as speed bumps to creativity. My career as an editorial assistant was definitely shortened by my inability to develop a filing system beyond neat piles stacked around my cubicle and sticky notes ringing my desktop monitor. I hope our kids take after her; otherwise, our house will be a disaster zone.

I sort bricks like a truculent child being asked to clean out his closet. Less sorting, more playing. I stop often to look at certain pieces (
LEGO makes tiny airplane turbines?
) and an hour later I’m still experimentally snapping bricks together. But building haphazardly is the creative equivalent of buttoning up your shirt after missing the first button. The end result is just slightly off.

I confess to
BrickJournal
editor Joe Meno that I’m stumped about what to do next. His suggestion is simple: “You need to build a plane,” he writes at the end of one of our e-mail exchanges. I move the turbine across my fingers like a poker player rolling a chip and set myself to answering this building challenge.

To find inspiration, I begin rummaging through the Mars Mission box, where I come across a part that is meant to be a building support for a lunar station. A square plate connected by minibeams to a rectangular plate—a cross between a flying buttress and a stanchion that supports an oil rig.

And that one element inspires the design of my first substantial MOC (my own creation)—the building supports remind me of the struts that connect the wings of a biplane. I initially look online for pictures of the pontoon plane featured in
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,
but my image search pulls up a black-and-white blueprint of a classic biplane of the same ilk as the one flown by the Wright Brothers.

Over the next seventy-five minutes, I secure a propeller to act as an engine and find that LEGO makes a variety of sloped pieces. I use these to make the body tilt slightly upward, suggesting that the plane is ready for takeoff. A biplane is essentially a flying rectangle with two sets of wings. It’s just four studs wide, so I’ll only need about a hundred pieces in total.

It’s relaxing to build with LEGO, until you can’t find a part—and then it is maddening. I rake my hands through thousands of pieces, occasionally wincing as the corner of a LEGO brick nicks the webbing between my fingers. After close to ten minutes of searching that would have made losing my house keys seem pleasant, I find a white steering wheel.
So, this is why you sort.

The cockpit complete, my biplane needs a pilot. Only one catch—I’ve failed to provide space for his legs. Not a problem. I pop the legs off the minifig I found and put a ladder on the side of the plane to hide my amputation. I send pictures to Joe, nervous to have somebody else judging what I have built; but as competitive as the world of adult fans can be, there is a lot of support for neophyte builders.

“Clever thoughts—removing the legs to make the fig ‘sit.’ Also, the wing supports—I would not have thought of that, because the supports I would associate with, well, buildings,” writes Joe.

I feel the pride that doomed Job. Could creativity be my hallmark as a builder? I have thought of a new use for a part that a guy who would go on to build a fully motorized WALL-E Robot that summer didn’t see. This is one of the main reasons that LEGO is so appealing. A novice can stack bricks alongside the professionals and find acceptance.

Joe brings me back from orbit by explaining that I’m currently building in what as known as “rainbow mode,” where I’m just using the available parts and not worrying about color. It’s the hallmark of those just getting back to the hobby. It suggests that either your collection is not yet large enough to support building monochromatically or you’re not conscious of the concept of design. More experienced builders will look to match real-world inspirations for their creations or just add detail in the form of pinstriping or shading that matches actual building materials.

Rainbow building could also happen because you’re color blind, I weakly offer back to Joe. I am slightly red-green color blind, but truthfully, not to a degree that I can’t tell the blue plates from the white plates that make up the wing.

I’m slowly learning that the real challenge in building with LEGO lies in the details. I tell Joe that I think the difference between an acceptable model and one that really seems special is the ability to find the right parts to represent pieces.

“As the pool of parts you use expands and you get familiar with them, you will realize that sometimes there is too much detail in the context. Would the biplane look better if the engine was more detailed? A good builder is like a good artist—he/she knows how to steer the observer to places on the model and detail accordingly. A uniform level of detail isn’t as effective—I think that is why I tend to not be impressed with buildings—a building by itself is dull, but the minifigs and little details are what makes them special,” writes Joe.

I consider the pool of a few thousand bricks spread out before me, noting not just the number of pieces, but all of the different types. There are tubes and wheels, and nearly every geometric shape in a rainbow of colors. It’s a big pile of detailed parts. It’s completely different from the tub of bricks that my parents bought me as a child in the 1980s. Maybe I don’t know much about detail building because it wasn’t possible to build such intricate models when I was growing up. The play themes (castle, space) had just been introduced, and minifigures had only a single expression of simple happiness. LEGO was simpler then.

Yet LEGO in the 1980s would have seemed fantastic to the children who played with the first wooden toys to come out of the toy shop launched by Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1932.

That year, Ole Kirk’s life was at a crossroads. His first wife, Kristine, had died giving birth to their fourth son, Gerhardt.

“Life is a gift, but also a challenge,” Ole Kirk, a devout Christian, is said to have remarked around that time.

At forty-one years of age, he was a widower living in the largest house in Billund, Denmark—a house that he soon might not be able to afford. The Great Depression meant that demand had dried up for the stools, Christmas tree bases, and ironing boards that were the trademarks of his carpentry and joinery shop. The last three houses he had built were sitting unsold.

Ole Kirk guessed that even in times of financial strife, people would still be willing to buy wooden toys for their children. His shop, already known for producing wooden blocks, was given a new name: LEGO. The name was a shortened combination of the Danish words
leg
and
godt,
meaning “play well.” (It later would be noted that the Latin word
lego
means “I assemble,” or “I put together,” a fact apparently unknown to OKC.)

The new name and toys debuted in 1934 at the Danish Trade Exhibition, the same year Ole Kirk remarried, wedding his house-keeper, Kirsten Sofie Jorgensen. The product line grew dramatically in 1937, when Ole Kirk purchased a wooden router, allowing him to build ducks, ships, and trains. At that time, wooden toys were seen as innovative, high-quality gifts for children, slowly eclipsing the tin tractors and mechanical toys from Germany that had dominated the market. Just five years later, LEGO officially became a family business, with Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, Ole Kirk’s third son, working alongside his father.

The success of the wooden toys allowed Ole Kirk Christiansen to purchase an injection-molding machine in 1946, the first in Denmark. Less than three years later, LEGO had a catalog of close to two hundred different wooden and plastic toys that for the first time included bricks.

But these early “automatic binding bricks” were made of wood, and were available only in Denmark. Plastic bricks wouldn’t be produced until 1953. LEGO applied for and received its first trademark a year later. The bricks were sold in barbershops as either singles or by the pack—packaged in a small box so that children could buy a brick just as Daddy bought a single smoke or a pack of cigarettes.

Godtfred had been toying with the concept of a system of play, in which all of the toys that LEGO produced in a given line could be used together. He settled on the plastic bricks, believing they offered the possibility for modular building. The LEGO System of Play began in 1955 and included twenty-eight different sets and eight vehicles.

Those initial bricks could stack, but they didn’t lock together. So LEGO developed the stud and tube system to improve the clutch power of the toy. The first molds made twenty-four 2 × 4 brightly colored plastic bricks. The iconic 2 × 4 brick was granted a patent in 1958, the same year that LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen died.

As the company expanded in western Europe with a large presence in Germany and Britain, Godtfred looked to sell LEGO toys in the United States. LEGO partnered with Samsonite Corporation in Denver, Colorado, granting them a distribution license from 1961 to 1972. The large-scale DUPLO blocks for preschoolers debuted in 1967, and ten years later, those onetime toddlers could build complex structures with the Technic line.

Thanks to Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, who represents the third generation to rise to CEO, the LEGO of today is a vastly different company from the one that defined my childhood. The 1990s saw a series of themes that disappeared after several years, though they have recently developed small cult followings online: LEGO Ninjas, Wild West, Time Cruisers, Aquazone, Adventurers, and Rock Raiders. LEGO attempted to develop story lines based around exotic themes, trying to find the right tone. But LEGO wasn’t hip, and Generations X and Y knew it.

By 1998, the company’s number of elements had swollen to over fourteen thousand different pieces in a wide range of colors and sizes. LEGO had moved away from the concept of a system, where all the parts could fit together. With a ballooning cost structure and declining sales in the face of a market that seemed to have shifted toward video games and electronic toys, the LEGO Group reported its first ever annual loss, $27.7 million.

“I hoped that their 1999 plans would hinge on improving their core product,” wrote adult fan Jeremy Sproat in a January 1999 posting on the forums of LUGNET The adult community was worried that the company they supported was changing direction in search of a younger consumer, forgetting the attraction of their original products.

“Is lego [sic] just not making enough of the items that people want? I would love to see the return of some of the older ‘retired’ sets like the 8880 Super Car. Why spend money designing and tooling a new set when they can re-release a classic?” asked David Forrest in a LUGNET thread from the same year. Adult fans were always tending toward different building interests than children, although ironically, many would look back wistfully on the favorite sets of their own childhood.