A T-Rex towers over visitors at the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark LEGO Group

Nathan Sawaya used to be a lawyer. Now he’s a LEGO artist. And, in the parlance of LEGO fandom, that makes him an AFOL – an adult fan of LEGO. “I asked my parents for a dog when I was around ten years old. They said no, so I tore down the sprawling LEGO city set in my room and built my very own life-size dog,” Sawaya recalls. His exhibition, Art of the Brick, is currently on a global tour. “After that, the bricks became an endless source of creativity for me.” he says.

Sawaya is a member of a global network of collectors, master builders, crafters and self-confessed brick addicts. “I think physical LEGO, with the brick at its core, is timeless,” says Chiara Biscontin, junior model designer at LEGO. Biscontin went from studying product design and engineering at The University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art to landing what she calls her “dream job” in 2016. “If you have bricks on the table you'll automatically fidget with them, and when you have more you'll automatically start creating something, whether you're a kid or an adult.”


LEGO, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this week, has gone from a deceptively simple children’s toy to inspiration for countless creatives. It’s inspired modern architecture in Bjarke Ingels' LEGO House and helps make kids bionic. The German artist Jan Vormann uses the colourful blocks to repair dilapidated streets, Philippine diners can digest one at Brick Burger, and in ‘Building Language Using LEGO Bricks’, Dawn Ralph and Jacqui Rochester share LEGO-based therapy methods for helping children with severe receptive and expressive language disorders.

"You can take a brick now, attach it to a brick 60 years ago and it works fine," says Darren Smith, founder of Exeter’s Brick & Mix toy store and formerly the owner of the UK’s largest private LEGO collection. "It's a brick, but it continuously refreshes itself. It's people using their own imaginations, and it's amazing what people come up with."

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Nathan Sawaya's Hugman sculpture was first displayed across New York City Nathan Sawaya

“It's not very often that you get a product which is still around today and is truly just as popular and as widely used today as it was 60 years ago,” says Michael LeCount, founder of Sheffield’s Bricks and Bits and owner of one of the UK’s largest and oldest collections – some of his pieces date back to 1932, when LEGO was wooden, not plastic. When asked if he has a favourite, he replies, “That's like asking me which is my favourite child.”


His collection now lies in a second home in his native Sheffield, a renovated four-bedroom house used solely as a roof for his 4,000 LEGO sets. “We got into an extreme situation where LEGO was just everywhere,” he says. And he’s got the battle scars to prove it. “Believe it or not, you get used to standing on LEGO in bare feet,” he jokes. “It's kneeling on it you'll never get used to. That's real pain, but when you've been doing it for years, you become hardened to it."

“I believe that if you're not a collector, like I am, it's hard to understand the purpose of it all," he adds. "What people don't appreciate is that the community of LEGO is unbelievable, all brought together because of their interest in what is literally a brick. It's a toy, but it's a wonderful creative material in its own right.”

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From humble beginnings, the AFOL community has flourished online. It has its own wiki and subreddit, and in the UK an online club for adult LEGO fans hosts regular real-world meetups. Its a theme that’s been repeated countless times around the world. “The LEGO community has proved itself an essential component of the wider LEGO machine,” wrote Sarah Herman in her 2014 book Extreme Bricks: Spectacular, Record-Breaking, and Astounding LEGO Projects from around the World. In what is a testament to this statement and LEGO’s enthusiastic fan base, the /r/lego subreddit is easily one of the site’s most wholesome. The LEGO Ambassador Network boasts representatives in over 300 separate communities, and Rebrickable provides free building instructions to thousands of fan-made MOCs (which stands for "my own creation").


There are a range of special building techniques for those wishing to go more off-piste. There’s the ‘studs not on top’ (SNOT) technique, placing LEGO elements on their sides or upside down to craft multi-dimensional structures. ‘Illegal’ building is a technique that bypasses conventional connections, and is frowned upon builders who adopt more purist approaches in their craft.

Can’t find the right word to describe your creation? Consult the Brick Blogger LEGO Dictionary. DSS refers to the ‘Dreaded-Sticker-Sheet’ and a Bignette is ‘a large LEGO creation’. Clone Brands are ‘construction toys similar and often compatible with LEGO, but cheaper in quality and price [...] often greatly despised by LEGO-fans”.

“Where else will you find a group of people who lovingly designate a piece of plastic as a BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece)?” says Zak, also known as Brikkyy13, an editor or ‘patroller’ of the online LEGO encyclopedia Brickipedia. “The acronyms developed over time out of necessity - it's much easier to use the term 'MOC' than ‘my own creation’, but they’re extremely important to the community as it helps to identify us and makes us stand out from the others.” And that community is increasingly rare online: everyone is nice to one another. It’s a block-filled utopia.

For some, however, finding utopia takes time.

“The ‘Dark Ages’ is a period of time, usually between your mid to late teens, when someone gives up the hobby for years or even decades, to pursue other interests,” says Anna Golson, editor of TheBrickBlogger. The love of LEGO runs in Golson’s family. “My mother is a mechanical engineer and my father an architect who frequently used LEGO for his models,” she says. “I think of LEGO more as a creative medium, like paint, wood, or clay, something that people from all backgrounds can use to manifest something from their imagination.”

An early LEGO set, circa 1950 LEGO Group


Sawaya understands LEGO in the same way, seeing the brick as a material we can all relate to and a way to democratise the artistic process. “One of the goals when I started out was to elevate this simple childhood toy to a place it has never been before, into the fine art galleries and museums,” he explains. “Plenty of people questioned the validity of LEGO as an art form at first. Doors were slammed, jokes were made, but now LEGO art is widely accepted in galleries, from Art Basel to London’s South Bank.”

While a simple plastic rectangle holds many forms amongst many people – from the designers creating innovative ways of building, to the fans ignoring the instruction manuals – the ethos ultimately remains the same to all. “When we’re thinking about what should come next I think about what excited me when I was a kid,” says Biscontin. “And that comes in keeping the brick at the heart of LEGO, and the creativity and imagination you can release with it.”

Thought it was all a load of blocks? Tread carefully: in the AFOL community, that’s heresy.