Block party

Rice School of Architecture students build a Lego city at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Rice School of Architecture students bust out their Lego chops for MFAH exhibit 

It’s probably no coincidence that Lego structures by Rice University students would feature an abundance of arches.

The classic campus was well-represented at the neighboring Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) Oct. 15 and 16 when the seeds were planted for an ongoing exhibit that will allow many hands to handle 1½ tons of white Lego bricks.

Hannah Wang, left, and Lara Hansmann build their Lego masterpieces in the lobby of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Law Building on Oct. 16. Rice students took part in "The Collectivity Project," which continues through the end of January. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Two teams of Rice School of Architecture (RSA) students, along with art students from Texas Southern University, worked for hours on both days to build the first iteration of an interactive cityscape. The public got to join in on the evening of the 16th, when the MFAH held a groundbreaking celebration for its new Glassell School of Art.

The white Lego bricks were brought to Houston as part of a traveling interactive exhibit by Netherlands artist Olafur Eliasson. It’s called The Collectivity Project, and it gave the students a chance to tap into their childhood imaginations with a somewhat more sophisticated eye.

“I grew up with Legos, but they were the multicolored ones — not these really nice ones,” said sophomore Lara Hansmann, who, with sophomore Hannah Wang, assembled scores of arches from smaller pieces and then used them to build a mega-structure.

Hansmann acknowledged bringing her architectural training to the project. “But we’re not taking this too seriously,” she said, smiling. “We’re doing a lot of experimentation.”

Confined behind a rope in the lobby of the MFAH’s Caroline Wiess Law Building, the students drew from a central table piled high with Lego bricks. Some built solid, block-like structures with intricate patterns inside or out; others went for spires. Still others assembled lattices that were not nearly as fragile as they looked.

Whether these imaginative structures withstand the test of time is up to museum visitors, who may modify the structures at will during the exhibit’s run. “The public will have access to deconstruct, reconstruct, add to, build more, just fill this space with creativity until Jan. 31,” said Jason Moodie, studio and gallery programs manager at MFAH.

“Some of these things, people will build on them and they’ll just fall over,” he said.

Rice School of Architecture student Dylan Rinda pieces together a Lego skyscraper at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

“When you look at the time lapse (from an installation at New York City’s Highline), you’ll see that some bridges were made from one table to the next, and they’re there only for a couple of seconds and then there’s no bridges anymore.”

Graduate student Dylan Rinda went up instead of across. “I don’t really know what I’m building,” said Rinda, whose structure towered over all of the others on the morning of Day 2. “If I had a chair, I could go higher. But I also don’t want it to fall on someone.”

Zach Gwin, a sophomore, took a more academic approach to his thin spires, rising like an extended hand from the white tabletop.

“I’ve been working against the idea of the Lego as the orthogonal, rectangular, 90-degree piece,” he said. “This unit in particular lends itself to rotation. I’ve started with singular bases that splinter as they move upward into an aggregation of towers. This way, I’m not working on one mega-structure, but a sort of cityscape, or a master plan of different iterations of the bending and morphing envelope.”

“Like Houston, this cityscape at the MFAH has no master plan,” said RSA Dean Sarah Whiting. “In the next months, this tabletop city will offer a mini-parallel of our own city’s rapid and unpredictable transformation. We’ll have to watch and see how these initial, daring architectural visions get transformed. Will they continue to reach for the sky or will they be bulldozed?”