Towers are also easy, because Lego's brick buttons connect vertically, not horizontally. Also, space is at a premium, just like - learning moment - it is in many cities. And if you want your creation to get noticed, high is the only way to go - low-rise gets lost against the rubble-jumble of loose bricks. This is no sprawling Lagos of Legos.
Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibited the art work over winter, and on the first day there people raced to build the highest tower. This is literal aspiration - to erect the tallest spire. Though the press release mentions community and collaboration, participants can have fun being as competitive as jazz-age Modernist capitalists.
It's a micro-metropolis in time as well as space: after a while, old towers will be demolished and new ones will rise in their place. It's the Danish equivalent of a temporary Buddhist sand mandala. This is great: permanently frozen Lego would shut down the bricks' ever-changing potential.
But, enjoyably, towers weren't the only creations on Auckland's first day. There was also a robot, a cat, a pair of helicopters. Most originally, a dog was balanced on top of a pair of scales - was this a comment on our former Minister of Justice? The message spelled in bricks was: STOP.
Limitations aren't bad; thinking up responses to them stimulates creativity. But it's good to know which limitations you can change or challenge if you choose to do so. Over future lunch-hours I'll follow the artist's city idea, but will resist the temptation of the tower.
Maybe I'll attempt a tree, maybe a monorail. Maybe a crystallised homage to the politics of urban discourse. It's gonna be breathtaking.
