Patching the City With Lego
Children and adults alike have long built fantasy cities out of Lego. But Jan Vormann seems like he’s on a mission to patch all the holes, cracks, and fissures in the walls of the world’s existing cities with the colorful toy bricks. As part of his Dispatchwork project, the German artist has already stuffed Lego pieces into holes on four continents, from Tel Aviv to Quito to New York — where he vowed to “support Mayor Bloomberg in his everyday struggle” by assembling a thirty person crew to patch a post office, the wall surrounding Central Park, Times Square’s police station, and, of course, the mosaic walls of the subway. In Berlin, passersby pitched in to help plug bullet holes left from the Second World War.
Vormann’s project has not been without incident. He dryly reports that Serbians were “not too into plastic,” muttering something “connected to the term ‘private property’”. In Quito, he inadvertently found himself patching the city’s “most dangerous” street. But his most difficult installation may have been Zürich, where the artist said it was “hard to find spots” because “the municipality is too wealthy to let the facades show decay”.
Tags: Art Installation, Street Art
Noemi says:
I think it’s a great idea! It’s like a clin d’oeil to our child heart, that is our best part! Thank you for writing about that.
March 10th, 2010 at 9:24 am