Brick by Brick showcases Lego builds of campus
Utah State University held its second annual “Brick by Brick” Lego building competition, bringing Aggies and members of the community together to celebrate their love for Lego. Students and friends alike showcased their building skills, entering their pieces into a competition to see who had the best build.
Builders from across Utah congregated in the TSC with their pieces to be judged. Many of the creators had been planning their builds for months, spending weeks creating their works.
“I started a few months ago because I thought they might do this competition again. I began the design on a Lego design software a few months ago. I created the whole thing digitally first,” said Evan Anderson, a USU alumnus and winner of this year’s competition. “I started building it about two weeks ago. I’d say I probably spent at least 100 hours putting it all together.”
Anderson had only begun his Lego design journey during last year’s competition, where he made a model of Old Main. This year, he won the competition with model of USU Maverik Stadium. Some other pieces from this year included a miniature model of Huntsman Hall and the George S. Eccles Business Building, a model of the Block A and the Quad, Old Main and much more.
In addition to the pre-prepared designs, there was also a timed building competition for attendees of the event, where they were tasked with building a certain object in a set amount of time, and judges decided who made the best design.
The idea for a competition was derived from a former USU president’s love for Lego and an attempt to find some way to bring that love to USU’s campus.
“This idea first came about when I was hired to run the USU president’s social media. President [Elizabeth] Cantwell was the president at the time, and it was a pretty well-known fact that she loved Legos,” said Jared Gereau, social media specialist at USU. “I was trying to create content for her channel at the time and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be kind of cool if there was some kind of Lego event on campus that she could go to and be a judge at?’ Everyone told me, ‘Why don’t you just make that an event?’”
Despite the competition being fairly new to campus, support from the Aggie community has helped the competition grow and invite more of the community to get involved with the university.
“Last year, we held the competition in the Eccles Conference Center. There were a lot of people who warranted a bigger space,” Gereau said. “We decided it would probably be better to move it over here to the TSC, and so far, it’s been great. This bigger space has allowed us to introduce more colleges into the event — kind of showcase what they’re doing on the sides.”
This showcase of the university is the real goal behind the event, finding creative ways to get people from the community onto campus and learn more about USU.
“Our main goal is primarily just to get USU into the public eye. We welcome any students to this event. They’re always going to be our primary goal to have come to our events, but the community around Logan, around Cache Valley, is important to us also. We love seeing future Aggies come up and learn more about Utah State culture,” Gereau said. “There’s a lot of cool builds up here in the showcase that teach what USU culture is. It makes a lot of fun opportunities to teach young, potential Aggies what it’s like up here and just a way to get everyone together.”