Three large rooms at the Eek! Comic and Pop Culture Fest drew countless visitors to Servus Place last weekend, but the most awed reactions came from the room filled entirely with Lego models.
The Northern Alberta Lego Users Group, one of hundreds of similar groups throughout the world, was displaying an impressive assortment of Lego models ranging from custom-built trains and buildings to classic sets.
And if you ask any of the artists, engineers and/or architects behind these builds, you’ll hear the same thing.
“Once you get started, you just don’t stop,” Kristopher Manabo said.
He has been a member of the group for about one year, and said what sparked his interest is a Christmas present for his nephews a few years ago.
Once he had finished helping them build their set, he found himself searching out another one and it just steamrolled from there.
As a professional architect, he said his interest in Lego complements his work life but provides him a way to better gauge the interest and appreciation in his work.
“I just like the way people react. It’s that reaction you don’t get with architecture,” Manabo said. “With architecture people drive by, but here, there’s a face to the reaction and a comment you can respond to in person.”
While he had a few classic sets on display, it was apparent from talking to him his real pride and joy were his original creations of robots, based on the character Metalbeard from The Lego Movie.
“There was a subtle hint in the movie, where they said he lost his crew,” he said. “So I played with that idea and rebuilt his crew out of Lego.”
That same desire to create original pieces is what motivates Lazslo Szojka, who has worked with the Lego user group for about 15 years.
All of the pieces he had on display were original creations, including a large train bridge between to six-foot towers and a Where’s Waldo piece featuring hundreds of red-and-white Lego figures lined up in stadium-style seating. After careful inspection, Waldo was indeed among the crowd.
His proudest creation, not counting a 21-foot suspension bridge that is no longer together, is a scale replica of St. Joseph’s College from the University of Alberta campus.
“I lived there as a university student, and I wanted to build it out of brick one day,” Szojka said. “So I approached the university for a blueprint and they gave it to me so I built St. Joe’s.”
He said his three children have all grown up with Lego – not surprising considering their father’s extensive collection – and his wife is supportive of his collection as well.
“It’s a hobby,” he said. “Some people build cars, some people fix old things, and I work with Lego. It’s a nice art form.”
For Andrew, a long-time member who asked his last name not be used because he worried it could affect his security clearance at work, the appeal of Lego is less as a toy and more as a medium for creating models and solving the engineering challenges that come from making an eight-foot structure out of small bricks.
His first to-scale model of an actual building is a replica of the Peace Hills Trust building in downtown Edmonton, and it is built to scale with remarkable detail, taking around 120 hours over many months to complete.
And like the other builders, once he started building these models and seeing what Lego could do, his collection grew and grew.
“Once I bought a house and was able to start storing in the basement, I was able to start working on the layout,” he said. “I need to buy an acreage so I can have my little Lego shed out back!”
For more information about the Lego user’s group, visit www.nalug.org.
