Artist Uses Legos to Fill Building Cracks

While most children found joy in knocking over the primary color Lego structures they built, one German artist is repairing the damage of actual Manhattan buildings with the construction toy—turning New York into his own Lego Land. Jan Vormann and his team of volunteers began repairing the city’s edifices with the colorful plastic Lego blocks two weeks ago as part of his “Dispatchwork” project. Vormann utilized the technique he first tested in cracks in centuries-old European buildings at New York fast-food restaurants, the walls surrounding Central Park, and other facades in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “The combination of stone bricks and plastic bricks creates all kind of different contrasts that, in my eyes, illuminate relationships between aesthetics and functionality,” Vormann told New York Post. While most of the patches have since been removed, the artist is unsure whether it was passersby or the City that undid his do-gooding. A spokeswoman for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg declined to comment.