In early 2020, my friend Christian Cowgill and I appeared in the first American season of LEGO Masters, a reality-style building competition show. For Episode 5 of the series, “Mega City Block” (3/4/2020), Christian and I created “Attack on Sustainable City,” an environmentally-minded city block under threat by an enormous pollution monster.
This build—which was divided into a 14 hour first part and a 4-hour second part—was a huge emotional roller coaster for me. As we wheeled our build into the gallery during the final two minutes of part one, our table hit a brick on the floor, sending a shock wave up the tall tower and toppling five of its fourteen stories. This catastrophic collapse felt like the lowest of lows… until we got an extremely lucky twist!
In part two of the challenge, during which we were instructed to put our city blocks “under attack,” Christian and I managed to both rebuild our fallen tower and create an iconic monster of which we were quite proud. Our finished model definitely made its mark; it turned out to be the tallest building of all.
“Attack on Sustainable City” landed us in the top two teams for this week. Read on for my special dissection of this model’s process, design choices, and more.
Conception and Execution
Sustainability appealed to Christian and me as a theme for a few reasons. One, the iconography of such a city would be easy to present, expound on, and make recognizable. Two, we thought modern architecture—which I especially wanted to pursue!—would look a little sterile without more of a raison d’être, without the softening touch of greenery and plantlife. Third, Christian and I both believe climate change is a threat to our planet; we wanted our build to address this global concern, then make a bit of a hopeful statement about humanity’s future.
Our idea to represent a block in transition, rather than sparkling super-sustainable block, came out of our desire to layer in an extra layer of story and realism into our build. Historically, humankind doesn’t technologically advance all at once, nor are beloved older buildings always scrapped in favor of the new and shiny ones! So we decided to highlight the dichotomy between old and new in our build, and explore the grey areas in between.
I spearheaded the build on Eco Tower, while Christian primarily focused on the other two buildings. We cooperated a lot when it came to the scenes on the ground, as well as ensuring our two buildings would be able to connect via a skywalk.
Of course, all of this building happened before the challenge’s twist. When time came to place our block under attack, the prevailing idea we came up with was to dig deeper into our story about the transition from old, polluting ways to new, eco-friendly ones. We personified the resistance to positive change in the gaseous, imposing form of Smogra. This evil pollution monster, woken by the renovations on the brownstone building, would rather keep humanity feeding him than allow them to repair the planet!
Color, Motifs, and Design Choices
From the start of the build, Christian and I made conscious choices around color. When telling everyone about the challenge, Brickmaster Amy had reiterated that she wanted to see colorful builds; Christian and I, as a result, wanted to be sure we delivered on that front. One of the first things we did was run to the Brick Pit, grab a few promising colors, and start combining them into micro-sized palates. We compared and contrasted these until we settled on the color schemes you see here now.
For Eco Tower, we knew white (synonymous with modernity) would be a prevailing hue, but we wanted to add some visual interest beyond that color. I put together a little stack of different shades of blue, and ended up multiplying that out on a grand scale to make a gorgeously striped gradient running all up the side of the tower. For the oldest building, using primarily earth tones made the most sense, but Christian was sure to add little lines of vibrant color along the window ledges, too. Finally, we wrought the corner restaurant—which was our most colorful building—in fiery reds and oranges to provide maximal contrast with the cool-colored tower opposite it. I really appreciate the striping Christian included here; it made the restaurant pop even from a distance.
Each building had its own repeating design elements to provide architectural unity. When it came to reinforcing motifs, Eco-Tower used its extreme height to its advantage; as a canvas, it was huge, so any aspect of one floor’s design would become a deliberate statement when repeated out. The vertical line of windows before the elevator shaft is one of my favorite consequences of this pattern. Meanwhile, for the brownstone building, Christian designed one window treatment and multiplied it out more than a dozen times to give the building its own sense of unity.
Eco Tower
For the centerpiece of our Mega City block, we designed Eco Tower, an ultra-tall skyscraper built to represent the pinnacles of environmental awareness, beauty in architecture, and modern engineering. I think we hit the mark pretty well; with its vertical gardens, elegant shaping, huge windows, and gradient siding, Eco Tower is a statement skyscraper of which I’m extremely proud.
I knew that a glass-fronted building would be easier to create at scale than a more solid-looking one… so, when the clock started, I grabbed as many huge transparent elements as I could! Eco Tower’s shape and structure were determined largely by these curved window panes. By putting four of them together, then leaving room for flat windows between, I discovered the size and layout I’d need to build for each of the tower’s floors.
As part one of the challenge proceeded, the number of floors I intended to build just kept rising! I decided to finally stop at fourteen. Once I’d settled on this number, it took about thirty minutes more to plan the different depths of each floor, to establish the gradient, and to mass-produce some of the siding. Then, the time came to get building and stacking.
I designed Eco Tower to be modular, with each floor built as its own solid piece only partially attached to the one below it. I chose this method of construction because it would enable me to easily reenter each floor and add a vignette inside, even after having essentially finished the structure of the tower. And finishing the structure of the tower was of paramount importance; after all, if Christian and I found ourselves racing the clock, it would be easier to fudge interior vignettes than to cut corners on architecture.
While Eco Tower’s modular construction obviously made it fragile at the break between floors—leaving it especially susceptible to that rogue brick that caused its collapse—it also turned out to be the tower’s saving grace, since it led to an extremely clean break. When the time came to pick up the pieces and rebuild, I was therefore blessed with a level surface on which to resume work.
Slices of Life
Each floor of Eco Tower held its own minifigure vignette within. I did my best to make these scenes unique from one another to represent the diversity of urban living. Although I had to adjust all these floor-by-floor vignettes during part two of the challenge to reflect the dramatic entrance of Smogra—and, therefore, the scenes mostly became a wash of terrified minifigures running towards the door!—I still think it’s worth noting how they began. From the ground and moving up, these were the original scenes:
1st Floor: entrance hall. A bright atrium featuring an information desk, a micro-replica of a wind turbine, and some potted plants.
2nd Floor: museum. A gallery full of modernist masterpiece canvasses.
3rd Floor: offices. A series of cubicles occupied by computers, desks, chairs, and the like. This floor also featured a water cooler!
4th Floor: offices. In the original scene, a few of the coworkers were talking to each other over their cubicle walls.
5th Floor: conference room. A long table surrounded by suited people talking about important business stuff. This was the floor where the skywalk happened to connect Eco Tower to its more elderly neighboring building.
6th Floor: casual café. Red tables and chairs were spread around the room, with waiters walking all over the place. The food being served here was primarily bananas! We imagined this, as everywhere else in Sustainable City, would use a dominantly vegetarian menu.
7th Floor: gym. I included a treadmill, a rack of weights, even a bench press. This would probably be Christian’s favorite room!
8th Floor: dance party. Some big speakers stood in corners of this open-concept room, with lots of minifigures cutting the rug all around. I enjoyed posing so many different dancers.
9th Floor: wine and cheese night. At one denizen’s apartment, several friends have met together for a classy soiree.
10th Floor: cozy apartment. Someone bookish lives here, and they love their coffee!
11th Floor: apartment bedroom. A big, wide bed flaked by bedside tables, with the best views in the city from out its huge window.
12th Floor: sophisticated club. High-top tables, stools, and a stocked bar make this the most happening spot in Sustainable City.
13th Floor: sky garden. An indoor greenhouse transitions into an open-air terrace full of plants.
14th Floor: observation deck. This open-air floor contained plenty of plants, but also held a few pay-to-look binoculars, the kind that always sit at the tops of skyscrapers.
Working Elevator
I was super excited to include a functional elevator on Eco Tower. It felt only fitting that a showstopping, ultra-modern skyscraper had one of those cool external glass elevators, the kind from which you can see the whole city as you ascend. When Eco Tower fell at the end of part one of the challenge, losing the top floor felt especially devastating to me because it held the elevator’s mechanism. Repairing this and having it work for our final presentation felt particularly satisfying as a result.
Like our Ferris wheel from week one, the mechanism here was simple in theory, but fickle to get just right. A motor, geared down, turned a spool that could wind or unwind, therefore allowing the elevator to raise or lower automatically. The engineering challenges were reducing friction as much as possible along the shaft and ensuring that the cables wouldn’t get too jumbled. I minimized friction by using round-edged Technic liftarms, rather than rectilinear bricks or plates, as the prongs which held the elevator in its place. The cable problem got solved pretty easily by reducing down from two cords to one.
While the front, glass-covered side of Eco Tower tapered inward as the building gets taller, the back side remained straight-backed to present a working elevator shaft. I made an identical set of grooves in each of the modular floors of the tower; this pattern led to some pretty repetitive building, but also ensured a functional mechanism that doubled as the spine of the building.
Sustainable Food for a Sustainable City
In the front corners of the block, we decided to focus on how Sustainable City got its food. So, we put together a little fast-casual restaurant, and a small urban farm.
To be optimally on-theme, our restaurant had to be a farm-to-table affair! Christian took point on this structure, and created a lovely-looking and colorful place to eat. With skylights, solar panels, and a rooftop garden, this restaurant is one of the two older buildings “in transition” to becoming more ecologically friendly. People in and outside the restaurant are enjoying vegetarian meals. One of my favorite details which was unfortunately passed over by the show is the colorful mural Christian designed on the restaurant’s park-side wall.
I, meanwhile, mass-produced the ears of corn and saplings for our micro-farm. This was an exercise in repetition, requiring far less skill than Christian’s building… but it felt like the best way to fill this unused space at the foot of Eco Tower!
The Work Site
On the brownstone building in the back corner of our block—the facades of which Christian designed masterfully—a team of construction workers are in the midst of turning an unused rooftop into a wind farm. The twin wind turbines are motorized; I geared their blades down to make the rotations look more realistic. On our original build, the turbines sat at the back of the building, but with the emergence of Smogra, we had to reposition them to the front.
We took the construction gear, material, and tools from the work site’s original scene and repositioned them so that they were being sucked up into Smogra’s dark mass. We were grateful to repurpose aspects and structures from earlier in the challenge even as our story changed.
Smogra
What does an evil pollution monster look like? Gaseous was our first thought; odious, dark, and smoky. Hence, Smogra! As a big mass of black bricks—accented here and there with some trans-black to give him a sense of depth, translucency, and oilyness—Smogra made for a perfect and deliberate contrast with the brightly colored city below him, especially the white Eco Tower.
Smogra’s skeletal shape came about as a result of our desire to personify him, and to tie him by connotation to the ideas of death, decay, and the end of humanity. Plus, Christian loves skulls! I built the monster’s head and arms, while Christian put together his immense, cloudy body. We built a roughly-sculpted texture for the base of Smogra, and refined to a bonier look as we moved up. I used enormous tires to give substance to the monster’s arms across a long, Technic structure. It was a bonus that their rubbery texture enhanced to Smogra’s polluted look!
The biggest challenge we faced with Smogra came about as a result of his size. It was simply difficult to hold him steady and strong, at a forty-five degree angle, with two enormous arms held up over his head! We relied on the prefabricated angles built into several Technic bricks to create an inflexible, strong pose for the monster. The balancing and reinforcing took a lot of trial and error (during which point, our monster did fall from his corner once or twice!), but we managed to get Smogra strong on his perch by the time of final judging.
Like on our Kraken from a few weeks earlier, Smogra’s red eyes glowed with light bricks. I designed these to be easily removable, so that we could keep them from burning battery as much as possible. When removed, Smogra looked like his whole face had been sunken in. Luckily for us, you’ll never get to see him looking so half-finished.
Pandemonium!
Of all the panicked scenes we wrought post-twist in “Attack on Sustainable City,” my favorite is this one. The construction crew, with nowhere else to escape, have to take the skywalk between their work site and Eco Tower. Obviously, they’re in a real rush to get out of there!
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.