A missing brick here and chipped stone there show the normal marks of wear and tear on the structures and streets of a city, but filling them in with multi-colored LEGO bricks makes them stand out in sharp relief with their surroundings – especially in a place like Berlin.
Titled ‘Dispatchwork’ (a linguistic play on ‘dispatching’ and ‘patching’ the holes), this is part urban art installation, part historical highlighting (since many of the gaps date back to World War II) and part method of calling attention to buildings that could use some help.
Jan Vormann has been toying with LEGO pieces for a long time in various artistic capacities – as well as infilling structural holes with mirrors and other attention-getting materials.
It may look haphazard at first, but there is an art to the process: identifying gaps is naturally subjective, and filling them in is both a creative and crafty act that can involve turning corners and working with existing structural details.
He started this project himself but (surprise!) many people stopped and signed themselves up to lend a hand when they saw what he was doing, grasping handfuls of LEGOs to help fill building voids and remodel life-sized brick-less spaces with miniature toy bricks of many colors.
