In the winter of 2020, my friend Christian Cowgill and I appeared in the first American season of LEGO Masters, a reality-style building competition show. For Episode 2 of the series, “Space Smash” (2/12/2020), Christian and I built Catastrophe at the Crescent, an unorthodox space station designed to be blown up by real-life explosives.

Read on for my special dissection of this model’s process, design choices, and more!