LEGO Brick Wall Build at the Iowa State Fair
Inside the Cultural Building at the Iowa State Fair, creativity comes to life—one LEGO brick at a time. The LEGO Brick Wall Build invites fairgoers of all ages to add their piece to a growing masterpiece, showcasing the power of imagination and collaboration.
Transcript
[Kat Gonzalez, Building Blocks Organizer] Our LEGO Mosaic Brick Wall build is located on the second floor of the cultural building. We are going to work together with fairgoers and they can create an image. We will add them to a large 6-foot LEGO wall. We will have a complete art piece that will be on display for the rest of the fair.
[Ethan Hastie, Brick Builder] People can build whatever they want on tiles.
It's 6x6, so they have 36, almost like pixels of individual pieces that they can build on that little plate.
[Woman 1] I decided to build a sunflower.
[Woman 2] Well, I created a pig. Now you have to use your imagination a little bit, but we've got the sun and the sky, the pig here with a little bit of grass.
[Kat] My son Ethan and I have been building LEGO. He started when he was 3 or 4 and he is now 22 years old and still building.
He's always been the builder in the family, but then that inspired my husband and I. Now we're going to different shows and displaying LEGO.
[Ethan] It is addicting. It's really addicting. It's kind of therapeutic actually for us, for a lot of people that do LEGO building.
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[Woman 3] Nice.
[Ethan] When I was 10 years old, I remember I came to the Iowa State Fair and I thought to myself, man, I love the Iowa State Fair so much. And so that following year, I worked tirelessly to build a little section of the fairgrounds out of LEGO. We brought it that first year and I got placed in People's Choice. And ever since then, I've been doing a big LEGO build every single year of the fair. And that's been over a decade that I've been doing that for. This year I built a LEGO fiddle. And this marks the 100th anniversary of the Fiddlers Contest at the Iowa State Fair. My dad is one of those fiddlers. I wanted to test my technical building abilities and build a replica of a violin, or a fiddle, as it's known here.
[Kat] We have had the LEGO division, the building blocks division here at the state fair for four years. Our very first year, we had only 26 entries. As of today, we have 63 entries.
This year we decided to build a fish aquarium as a collaborative build with our local LEGO users group. And there were 12 to 13 participants that each provided a part of that build.
I believe LEGO is an art form because you can use it to create something that is not instruction based. So it allows not only children, but adults to participate and use their imagination to build something and make it come to life.
[Child 1] It's a waterfall. It's got some darker gray down here for some wet rock. Some brown down here for some dirt, some trees, some grass. And then the sky up here.
[Child 2] I really love LEGO.