We’re not sure how we missed that Brickfest 2005, a “celebration of Lego creativity” that highlighted creations by talented Lego builders, was happening in our own backyard this weekend at George Mason University, but we did. And now we are sad. Because it looks like it was totally fun. A Wired article we ran across talks about Brickfest and highlights the obsession and attention to detail that results in the creations:
Arthur Gugick, a teacher from Highland Heights, Ohio, displayed an elaborate replica of the Taj Mahal that took him eight weeks to construct. His obsession began shortly after he and his wife bought a new house with more space, giving each other $1,000 each as a moving-in present.
“She bought herself an exercise machine, and I bought a thousand dollars’ worth of Legos,” Gugick said, noting that he ended up spending much more to complete his various creations.
“I had to start tutoring on the side to pay for it,” he said. “The joke is that if I build anything else, we won’t have any more eating spaces.” (Gugick plans to create a Lego shrine in the basement of the house.)
Browsing photo galleries from Wired and the Post, and loads o’ photos on Flickr, we see that we missed Lego renditions of everything from Homer Simpson to the Indianapolis Speedway, from the U.S. Capitol to scenes from “Star Wars.”
The convention, which is the annual gathering for the AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego) didn’t go smoothly for all, though. Wired quotes David Winkler, a Microsoft software engineer, about his nightmarish experience at the airport: “I had one piece that the TSA took apart and then put back together randomly.”
Photo by Michael Grebbs of Wired
