Brick World

LEGO at WOW · Vila Nova de Gaia

A large-scale exhibition built out of LEGO: installations, builds and interactive rooms, across a whole floor.

Role: Production and installation
Year: 2025
Disciplines: Exhibition production, Installation, On-site coordination

A wall of lit niches holding minifigures, with LEGO spacecraft suspended over the white diorama

Brick World turns the floor into a sequence of large-scale visual and interactive moments, rooms you walk into rather than displays you walk past. It is built for visitors of very different ages, so it has to work as spectacle and as something you are allowed to touch.

The builds are not ours. They belong to collectors and to the people who made them; the work here is the exhibition around them: the rooms, the structures, the lighting, the sequence you walk through.

That structure is honeycomb cardboard throughout, cut and slotted together. There is double-sided tape where it is needed, but the pieces are drawn to stand by their joints rather than by adhesive.

A corridor with the Porto skyline rendered as a pixel mural, over a chequerboard floor — The city, in bricks, along the way in

A large LEGO build of Rio de Janeiro, lit against a red wall — Rio, built at full height against the red wall

A dark wall of small lit niches, each holding a single minifigure — And a wall of very small ones, one figure to a niche

My contribution

I worked on the production and installation, on site, through one of the most demanding phases of the project.

The install ran against a tight deadline with a large number of elements to assemble, position and finish in a very limited window. That meant constant coordination between teams, careful sequencing of what could happen when, and solving problems on the spot as they appeared, from positioning and assembly through to final adjustments and finishing.

Precision without losing speed, which are not naturally friendly to each other.

Hands assembling a LEGO build from a tray of loose bricks — Built by hand, then stood up as a room

The entrance to Pirate’s Bay, with lit portholes in a blue wall — Built by hand, then stood up as a room

Development render of the workshop room, with long colourful build tables — What it was being built toward: the workshop room, in development

The finished workshop room, with build tables and pixel artwork on the walls — And built

An intense process, and the best education I could have had in the practical half of large-scale exhibitions: planning matters, but so do adaptability, communication, and deciding quickly and being right often enough.

A dark room with large lit discs on the wall, one carrying a pixel figure — Open, and dark on purpose

The dark room seen wide, with builds suspended over a white island — Open, and dark on purpose

Credits

Exhibition design by United By for WOW, World of Wine, Vila Nova de Gaia. The LEGO builds on show are the work of their collectors and creators, not ours. LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor, authorise or endorse this site.