The story of these giant LEGO Minifigures is rooted in geography. I lived in Potsdam, NY for nine years as a professor at State University of New York at Potsdam. Potsdam is located in St. Lawrence county, New York State's largest in terms of land mass and towards the smallest in terms of population. Potsdam does not have much retail, the small downtown already had 12 empty storefronts before the Wal-Mart first opened well into the 2000's. Lack of retail options and an overall cultural thriftiness established a serious "garage sale" tradition across the North Country. Many Friday mornings I would make a travel mug of coffee put my young children in a stroller and buy all the bricks at any garage sale I came across on our walk.
This eventually resulted in me having a fairly sizable collection of essentially random bricks. One of the things I have learned is that working with an endless supply of LEGO bricks is intimidating to many. In my case sorted the bricks by color. I decided I would build projects designed to decrease the volume of a particular color. A random sample of Lego bricks yields a great deal of yellow. A family trip to Legoland made the giant minifigure idea clear. Adding the "This giant minifigure is actually a giant robot" aspect came during play with my kids during building. My son insisted on leaving pilot in the chest cavity as a driver. As you can seen in images below, a second minifigure this scale is quickly coming together, a blue one that will have visible mechanical pieces seen in the front.
Photo credit for the two images above is Park's own Mickie Quinn!
Above is a picture of a completed project and the latest build (the blue one). The latest build is being done at the my Lab at Ithaca College. The central idea with my lab's second "Robot" is that it is based on Lego's classic Space theme and uses slopes compared to the step design Lego uses for large park sculptures. The front of the robot will be open with exposed gears inside. The front of the chest cavity will have a heart shaped opening.
Below shows the sketches and mood board on our giant lab whiteboard for the blue mech. We just knew it was going to be blue!
Meet our Model! If anyone seeing this knows who designed the explorer below, thank them for us! This build was located at Legoland Florida in 2012 and serves as the template for the large "robots" we are building. These photos are the ones uses to decide scale. We ran out of flat yellow pieces, so the hands are different and the decorations across the figure are also our own. Shown for comparison and to credit the artist!
