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John Lamers, left, and Andrew Mansbach, shown here in Lamers’ garage, met at Greenville’s Lego Store in 2018. “I thought I was alone in my love of Lego,” says Lamers. “But when Andrew and I met, we realized that there were other AFOLs (adult fans of Lego) like us.” And thus SC Bricks was born.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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SC Bricks member Karl Joffre (center) purchased an old furniture store and turned it into POJO Brickhouse, a warehouse, display museum and playground for the members of SC Bricks. Once a month they gather to eat pizza, compare builds, and sort through crates of loose Lego pieces.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Built with a sense of humor, John’s Farm features subtle jokes and pop culture references, from superheroes tending the vegetable patch to a wolf guarding the sheep pen. “Nothing in Lego is normal. Everything is hodge podge. If it looks like everyday life, it probably shouldn’t,” says brickgineer John Lamers. “It should always look like something with a twist. That’s what’s fun about Lego.”
Photo by Keith Phillips
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At a 2023 SC Bricks show, Matthew Gunning displayed his life-sized Lego Dots recreation of the famous pointillism painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat. “Every single dot represents a brush tap on the surface,” he says. “It’s exactly 98,304 dots.”
Photo by Keith Phillips
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Pick-a-Brick City, a collaborative build by members of SC Bricks, is often the star attraction when the group hosts public display events.
Photo by Keith Phillips
Pick-a-Brick City has to be one of the wildest places on earth.
On any given day in the massive Lego city, a velociraptor may hover over a gang of Minions marching toward the Flamingo Night Club, where dozens of costumed party-goers dance on a rooftop bar. Two medieval armies could square off on Main Street, holding up road crews, streetsweepers, motorcyclists, bicyclists, dogwalkers, hot dog vendors, cops and a legion of Stormtroopers. The city has its urban essentials—a hospital, a post office, a firehouse, restaurants, a hotel and even a Lego Store—but you never know when you might see, for instance, a Transformer coming around the corner, or Jack Pumpkinhead approaching the Scooby-Doo van on horseback.
One of the city’s principal architects, Andrew Mansbach, explains that the collaborative display measuring approximately 160 square feet has taken more than 100,000 bricks and a decade to build, and that it began when he first built the house from The Simpsons. From there, he built the Qwik-E-Mart. Then the Krusty Burger. Then the show’s comic book store—The Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop. The city, he realized, had been founded.
“Lego is really contagious,” he says while showing off the city during a public display event organized by the South Carolina Lego Users Group. “It just keeps compiling and compiling. When The Simpsons house first came out, it was a $200 set. As soon as you spend $200 on a Lego set, all bets are off.”
“It’s 100% a creative outlet,” explains another of the city’s “brickgineers,” John Lamers. “We create things in our mind all the time, we see things out in the world, and Lego gives us the chance to build them.”
Lamers and Mansbach founded the group, more commonly known as SC Bricks, so adult fans of Lego (AFOLs) could compare builds, exchange ideas and locate hard-to-find pieces. The pair met at the Lego Store in Greenville’s Haywood Mall in 2018.
“I thought I was alone in my love of Lego,” Lamers says. "I've been collecting Lego for much of my life and I had a garage where I built and stored my collection. But I didn't display them anywhere, or even share my love of Lego with anyone. But when Andrew and I met, we realized that there were other AFOLs like us and we decided to start a Lego group. There are a lot of people like me who love Lego and have a house, garage or office filled with Lego. You can't imagine!”
Fast forward five years—a time when Lego grew increasingly popular because of The Lego Movie, the Fox television show Lego Masters, and everyone posting their Lego builds on social media during the pandemic—and the club now has more than 100 members. They meet at least once a month to eat pizza, show off their latest projects, trade or sell or sort pieces, collaborate on builds, and plan their upcoming events.
Throughout the year, they display at public shows and conventions all over the state (for upcoming displays, visit scbricks.com). At these events, families mill about from table to table, oohing and aahing at the remarkable level of detail and making their way across a sweeping range of different Lego builders.
There are the city builders, the castle builders, the pirate ship builders. There are Star Wars themes and Harry Potter themes. Some people are into World War II battle scenes, some into retro Lego sets, some into cars. Today there’s a Lego fish tank, a Lego replica of St. Michael’s Church in Charleston, and a life-size Lego Dots reproduction of the famous pointillism painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” by Georges Seurat.
“I have never gone to a Lego show and not been surprised and inspired by someone else’s creativity,” says Matthew Gunning, who spent nearly five months working on the Lego Seurat. “I love seeing people take what’s originally supposed to be a child’s toy and elevate it to art.”
And if all art, to paraphrase Picasso, is being able to see the world again like a child, then it’s no wonder that Lego is such a perfect medium. Whether constructing from an official Lego kit or doing what’s known as a M.O.C. (“My Own Creation”), many Lego builders say they’re able to return to a childlike sense of wonder.
Karl Joffre, an SC Bricks member who purchased an old furniture store to use as a Lego display museum called the POJO Brick House, says, “Being able to experience and play in different realms depending on my mood—a lot of it is therapeutic. It’s like putting together a three-dimensional puzzle.”
Certainly, they all have what they call “The Dark Ages”—that period in their lives when they gave up Lego for a time—but they can all remember their first builds as kids. Andrew Mansbach’s was a train. John Lamers’ was a castle, and Matthew Gunning’s was the 1979 Galaxy Explorer from Star Wars.
Jordan Fielder, however, took it one step further. When the time came for him to pick his major at Clemson, he told his advisor he grew up loving Lego, and his advisor suggested that he consider engineering. Today, Fielder is a structural engineer who designs buildings all over the world and comes home at night to work on microscale Lego reproductions of world-famous landmarks—the Burj Khalifa, the Coliseum, the Pyramids of Giza.
“I sit and work all day on a computer,” he says. “I’m doing calculations. I’m in meetings. So, it’s nice to kind of unplug and work with my hands and think through some problem-solving.”
Lego is the No. 1 toy in the world, but it’s more than a child’s plaything. The 91-year-old Danish company offers “nostalgia kits” that appeal to adults. This is the consumer group, after all, that can afford the brand-new, expensive sets.
The members of SC Bricks, though, are quick to point out that Lego doesn’t have to be so costly. You can go to the “Pick-a-Brick” wall at any Lego Store and fill up a cupful of single pieces. You can look online for used pieces, and you can reuse the pieces from your old kits. At conventions, they hold a “draft” in which they separate pieces by color and type; the idea is that you can get a whole bunch of one piece for a fraction of the cost.
Mansbach, for instance, needed a ton of clear bricks to install the windows on Pick-a-Brick City’s hospital, so he filled up a cupful of those pieces on his next visit to the Lego Store. He had been inspired to build a hospital, he says, after spending a lot of time in one when his son was born.
And that may be the ultimate benefit—Lego makes you pay better attention to the real world. It’s the reason why almost all Lego builders have folders on their phones filled with architectural pictures.
“Once you start building a replica out of Lego,” says Gunning, “suddenly you notice window treatments or spacing between buildings like you’ve never noticed them before. Having gone through that process of recreating something, your eye becomes suddenly more attuned to shape and width and overall harmony.”
Or, as Lamers put it: “You see life through the lens of Lego.”
He says this while standing beside his most recent project, a farm that is nearly as crazy busy as Pick-a-Brick City. People are training horses and picking flowers and planting carrots and driving tractors and watering sunflowers. It’s not hard to imagine, from two tables over, that this is the source of the city’s food supply.
As Lamers looks around at all the kids and their parents hanging out together on a Saturday in a library, talking and pointing and getting inspired, he adds, “I feel like what I’m most proud of is this. I look at this, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can build.’”
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Get More
To find the next SC Bricks public display event or to join the club, visit scbricks.com.