Block party

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/03/2019 (2403 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For kicks, members of the Manitoba Lego Users Group, MLUG for short, sometimes put their individual talents to the test by building spaceships or dinosaurs out of Lego blocks while wearing oven mitts, or using their wrong hand.

Even better: from time to time, MLUG associate Shaun Warkentin, a software designer by day and self-described “Lego geek” by night (OK, occasionally mornings or late afternoons), doesn’t even bother taking his multi-coloured segments out of their plastic packaging before getting down to business.

“When you buy a new set, the pieces come in a bag, obviously,” Warkentin says, standing in the foyer outside Glenwood Community Centre’s Murdoch Room, where he and 25 other MLUG members have gathered for their regular, semi-monthly meeting of the minds. “Except instead of opening the bag, some people, myself included, like to challenge themselves by building the set inside it, a bit like building a ship in a bottle. Obviously if it’s a larger set and there are multiple bags that’s not going to work but for smaller models, yeah, it’s a good practice tool.”

MLUG, one of roughly 300 comparable organizations world-wide, was formed in 2011 by club “ambassador” Richard Strifling. That year, the 47-year-old father of two attended a toy show in Morden. After encountering a vendor’s Lego display there, he spent time on the internet trying to unearth other Manitobans who shared his passion for the toy interlocking bricks, invented by Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen and first sold commercially in 1949. (Lego is short for leg goht, which means “play well” in Danish.)

“I managed to find a few and after trading emails back and forth, we agreed to meet to see what we could put together in the way of a club,” says Strifling, guessing he was four years old when his parents bought him his first Lego set, a helicopter and ambulance combo.

OK, maybe that first get-together wasn’t much to write home about, given only a half-dozen people showed up. Since then, however, the club has grown steadily — largely through word of mouth — to the point membership now stands near 40, a mix of men and women from all over the province.

“What’s great about coming to the meetings is you get an opportunity to see what other people are building, as we usually kick things off with a half-hour or so of show-and-tell,” Warkentin says. “More importantly, we’re able to trade ideas and interact with people who all speak the same language. I mean, I’m 37 and still playing with Lego. It’s not like there’s a lot of people where I work who can say the same thing. So it’s great to be able to spend a couple of hours every other month in a room with a group of my peers talking shop, so to speak.”

● ● ●

At precisely 1 p.m. on a recent Sunday afternoon, Strifling calls the first MLUG meeting of 2019 to order.

The initial item on today’s agenda is “important dates to remember.” We’re told that includes the second Saturday in April, when the four-year-old Lego store in Polo Park will host an appreciation day for the local club, plus the two-day Manitoba Mega Train Show and Sale in September, which will feature MLUG as one of its official exhibitors.

After asking whether there are any additional topics that need to be addressed, which leads to a quick, roundtable discussion about the recently-released The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (not bad, but not as good as the first seems to be the consensus), Strifling reminds everybody they’ve come on a special day. For the past four years, the Lego corporation has donated what’s known as support bricks to the club, for use in displays when they attend shows. Except Lego’s support has changed somewhat, he adds, and they won’t be sending the club any more bricks.

What does that mean? Today club members are going to spend a good chunk of their meeting dividing the support bricks up amongst themselves for their personal use, close to 30,000 of them. (Ha ha ha, it sounded like Strifling said they’re going to divvy up 30,000 Lego bricks. “That’s right,” he says. “This could take a while.”)

● ● ●

At 19 and 22 respectively, brothers Sean and Matthew Kohli are the youngest people in the room by a few years. Both have been playing with Lego since they were toddlers. They discovered the group four years ago while attending Manitoba Comic Con.

“We were already part of an online Lego community, but having an actual place to meet with people and talk about projects is really cool,” Sean says, instructing Matthew, in line for the giveaway, to “go for green (bricks)” next, because they’re great for building terrain.

Sean and Matthew, both students at the University of Manitoba, agree spending a few hours away from the books each week coming up with their own creations — for today’s show-and-tell portion, they presented a craft similar to one they spotted on the TV series Battlestar Galactica — is a great stress reliever. Not that there isn’t some angst associated with their mutual hobby.

“Because we’ve been building together since we were kids, ours is a shared collection. So for sure, things are definitely going to get messy when one of us decides to move out,” Sean says, mentioning the group as a whole donated $2,000 worth of Lego to the Children’s Hospital this past Christmas, something MLUG members try to do on an annual basis.

● ● ●

Counting on her fingers, Kristen Klassen guesses she is one of just three or four women who belong to MLUG. Featured in the Free Press just last month in a business column by Martin Cash, Klassen runs her own business, Brickstorming, which focuses on team-building, strategic thinking and design planning using Lego as a hands-on technique called Lego Serious Play (LSP).

“I joined the club in 2013. I was looking to source Lego for workshops I was doing for large teams and somebody mentioned them to me, saying they might be a good avenue for free bricks,” she says.

Unlike most of her MLUG cohorts, Klassen didn’t grow up playing with Lego, instead latching onto the pastime “later in life.”

“Lego has been a part of my creative catharsis, I guess you could say. I like to build mosaics and art pieces — I’m not really into pre-built sets like Star Wars — and through the group have been able to display some of my stuff at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, which was pretty cool,” she says. (In 2015, as part the exhibit Olympus: The Greco-Roman Collections of Berlin, the WAG showed off a number of intricate designs built by Klassen and other members, including replicas of an ancient Greek theatre, a chariot race and the Parthenon.)

“When you build by yourself, you tend not to learn new techniques,” Klassen goes on. “But here, people introduce a lot of new techniques to the group and soon you find yourself going, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, I never would have thought of using a piece that way.’”

● ● ●

Pity Kayax Arki.

After staying up until 2 a.m. the previous night, putting the finishing touches on a project he intended to show off this afternoon, he awoke to find his two daughters, age eight and five, dismantling it, top to bottom, in the living room.

“I know people who like to keep their designs behind glass or high on a shelf where it’s out of reach from their kids, but that’s not me,” Arki says, shrugging his shoulders. “I let my girls play with my models all the time; in our house, there are no rules. I also encourage them to build their own things so definitely, if they want to take Daddy’s castle or whatever apart and make something else, power to them.”

Arki, 37, thought his buddies at work were joking a few years ago when they told him he should join an adult club dedicated to Lego, hailed as the “Toy of the Century” in 2000 by Fortune magazine.

“I was like, Lego club? What the heck’s that? I thought I was the only geek my age who still played with Lego. But after one of them Googled it and discovered there was a club right here in Winnipeg, I said something like ‘OK, sign me up,’” he says, adding his wife immediately encouraged him to join, when he mentioned it to her at dinner that night.

“She enjoys seeing the things I make but she doesn’t want to hear about the process. Here at meetings, we dive pretty deep sometimes, so it’s nice to have that opportunity to chat about Lego without feeling like you’re boring somebody to tears.”

Due to the model mishap involving his daughters, Arki arrived with a show-and-tell item he’s shared with the group before, a battery-operated, remote control 4 x 4 “with gears and everything” that took him five months to build.

As impressive as it is, he’s currently thinking of dismantling it and using the close to $500 worth of parts for a different project, altogether.

“The problem is my family forbids me from taking it apart,” he says with a laugh. “My wife tells me the kids love it too much, and that I should just build something else. So if that means having to go out and buy more Lego, I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca