For the love of Lego, builders give it their all
Bricks by the Bay attracts hundreds of creators
Eliza Busha got hooked on Legos building replicas of the California beaches she grew up visiting and sees the plastic building blocks as a way to stay connected with her home state now that she lives in Arizona.
Jack Slovacek channeled his budding passion for engineering into becoming a 14-yearold master of Great Ball Contraptions, elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style machines that lift, knock, spin and drop little plastic balls.
Legos are the unifying passion at Bricks by the Bay, a massive convention that has brought hundreds of builders to the Santa Clara Convention Center since Thursday, plus thousands of nonbuilder attendees, who are warned sternly not to touch the displays, which have taken hours, days or sometimes months to build.
The convention continues today, its final day.
As much as Legos are themselves a hobby, a walk around the convention hall makes clear they’re also a platform for a builder’s other passions — a way for robotics fans to engineer new creations, for fantasy lovers to craft worlds that might otherwise stay on the page, for music fans to pay tribute to their idols or for history buffs to recreate what they’ve studied.
“You can definitely see the art people are interested in,” said Busha, 46.
She was a late arrival to the plastic-brick world, especially when compared with some builders at Saturday’s convention. Like Jack, Busha’s son Connor started working with Legos as soon as the bricks were no longer a choking hazard.
Busha started building with Legos in her mid-20s, introduced to the hobby by her husband, Randy. Today, the “Lego household” belongs to Cactus Brick, a group of Phoenix-area builders whose sprawling 12.5-foot by 25-foot display was one of the convention’s show-stoppers.
In the Cactus Brick Lego world, a locomotive from “The Lone Ranger” and a French high-speed train clattered out of a plastic rail yard and past the Wayne Enterprises skyscraper of Gotham.
Then they traveled along a bridge over a bay with frolicking mermaids and went past a detailed retelling of “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with Dorothy’s black-and-white farm, the colorful homes of Munchkinland and the glowing green of the Emerald City.
“Sometimes we get a little crazy,” said Corey Gehman, a 52-year-old software engineer who controlled the trains with a custom app on his phone.
Nearby tables held smaller and more familiar scenes: One builder recreated a Giant Burger stand and a Tommy’s Doughnuts in Hayward.
An homage to Robert Indiana’s famous “LOVE” sculpture included one recreation of the original and another spelling — what else — “LEGO.”
Sellers hawked Lego kits, presumably aimed at the novice visitors at the convention. For builders working on custom designs, vendors offered random pieces in bulk, and visitors sifted through massive piles of bricks, wheels and panels sold by the pound.
At the “Junior Builders” table, young visitors marveled at Lego versions of the maps from the video games Fortnite and Halo.
Builders like Jack are coming of age at a time when fans can find directions for wild Lego creations online and watch Youtube videos from builders with more than a million followers.
It’s a far cry from the Lego scene that existed when Joe Slovacek, Jack’s father, was growing up.
“There were red bricks and white bricks,” Joe Slovacek, 65, said with a laugh.
“This has taken over our house,” he said. But, he added, he’s found it rewarding to watch his son’s passion for Lego and for the world of gears and pulleys grow.
Jack started playing with Duplo blocks as a toddler, and he and his dad have attended Bricks by the Bay for the past six years, coming from their home in Mammoth Lakes.
At this year’s convention, Jack contributed a conveyor-belt system and a clattering plastic train, among other pieces, to the Great Ball Contraption, which is made up of dozens of other modules.
Jack has made Lego kits and scenes in the past, but he said nothing clicked for him like the hypnotic, factorylike movement of these mechanisms.
“Once you get it done, it actually does something,” Joe Slovacek said. “You notice how fun it is to create something.”