If you’ve ever been to a LEGO fan event like BrickCon or Bricking Bavaria (and if you haven’t, do look for an event in your area!) one of the highlights is seeing collaborative builds where the parts, creativity, and passion of a team comes together to make something epic. 2024 saw some incredible collaborations, like Rogue Ronin or the latest incarnation of New Hashima. One of our favorite collabs of 2024 was “Medinat al Musawrah,” a fictional city inspired by the architecture of the Middle East and North Africa that is both modern and ancient. When we learned that the display would be returning in 2025 at BrickFair NoVa with new additions from Blake Foster and others, we reached out to the organizers to discuss the project’s inspiration, creation, and future.
A big thanks to Michael Willhoit, George Hawes, and Tobias Whelan for sharing their story.
TBB: First, can you talk about how the project came together? You had all just teamed up for the Old City district of New Hashima. What inspired this new collaboration?
Michael: The project was born from a few different factors. First, I wanted to move away from cubes. Having just completed New Hashima, some collaborators and friends of mine expressed interest in breaking away from using just a cube standard because of the constraints it had. It’s a tried and true technique but I wanted to devise a new system. More odd angles, pockets and alleys, density, and generally capturing the feeling of a city that’s been standing for centuries. Originally I modeled this off the iconic Kowloon Walled City, but that brings me to the next factor. We wanted to move out of the Eat Asian aesthetic sphere. I personally find a lot of inspiration in the Middle East, and I was lucky enough that I found people to share that. Looking in that area you can see similar insane density in cities like Cairo. There were initially 11 of us to test this. Everyone brought something unique to the display that I think really pushed it forward. George and Tobias shared in coordination roles, and George particularly contributed a massive modern pyramid structure to the build.
Tobias: I’ve been collaborating with George, Mike, or both of them since 2019. They’re some of my closest buddies and we can all unify a vision despite stylistic differences in building. Even with the massive scale of 2023’s New Hashima, George, Mike, and I all built for the Old City portion.
George: For the Old City section of the New Hashima build at Brickworld Chicago 2023, a lot of us were pulling Middle Eastern influences into our sections. This started a conversation about what we wanted to build next and shortly after Brickworld I began working on my pyramid sections.
Tobias: Urban realist builds have always interested all three of us, and this definitely came through in the Old City in New Hashima. We’d talked for a while about creating a small collab with a very controlled aesthetic, and this seemed like as good a time as any to try and implement it. Through some brainstorming calls, I’d tried out some different massing models in Stud.io, leaning heavily on a Mediterranean sea wall typology. The town sorta sloped down into the sea. While this didn’t come to fruition in the 2024 rendition, keep an eye out for a harbor in the 2025 build. Mike had worked through standardizing several angled building footprints and modeled the massing first in Rhino 3D, then Stud.io.
TBB: Whereas New Hashima is clearly a work of science fiction, this project is much more grounded in architecture of the present and past. How do you balance realism with the speculative?
Michael: It’s odd to say but this project falls a bit more within the realm of historical fiction and even fantasy. Like I said earlier in my mind this is set somewhere in the 1970’s. Tobias even had the bright idea to shoot it only on film cameras to give it a more vintage look. Old and New colliding is the essence. Structures built in the 1200’s with a payphone and a window unit AC is the vibe. When some newcomers ask me what would fit, what should the function be, I usually tell them don’t start with the funciton. In places like this, a building undergoes a thousand program changes. A bathhouse built in 1560 could be a vodaphone storefront now. I also tell people to go heightened on the aesthetics and building elements. Make the facade look rooted in Islamic architectural tradition, but extrude that up 10 storeys. I think that’s where the balance comes in.
Tobias: We actually originally intended a bit more of a cyberpunk lens for the build; no flying cars or any of that shit, but definitely more of a dystopian, occupied city. We never really discussed steering away from that, but as work-in-progress photos were shared, it was kinda understood that this was just gonna be a pretty contemporary build. Maybe a few robot arms on people, but I guess we’ve had those in real life for like 20 years at this point.
George: As the sections started to come together a lot of the cyberpunk elements were left behind. We strayed from the cyberpunk themes as we had just done a big collab using those elements and we wanted the focus of this collab to be the buildings and not the futuristic aspects. There is still some tech and electronics scattered throughout the build but nothing that sets it too far into the future.
TBB: The city layout feels a lot less grid-like than New Hashima, but everything fits together so neatly. What sort of tools and guidelines did you have for contributors?
Michael: I got really micromanage-y with the map. Like you said it’s not on a grid, which made coordination between sections really important, especially at the wedge angles. On top of that we had it gradually slope upward, so we had to be careful with making sure the topography was correct. The only real standard we had was to reach around 70 studs of height and make sure your shared walls don’t have any bare filler. We have a style guide and a pinterest board for aesthetic considerations, but we welcome anything that a contributor brings to the table that fits the theme.
George: Michael worked with a fellow member of the New Hashima collab to create three standard footprints for the sections. We wanted to stray from the grid-like structure of New Hashima to create a more authentic Middle Eastern city layout. There was a lot of initial planning to find a layout that we were comfortable with, but the bigger challenge was finding ways to fill in the internal gaps. Multiple of the sections of the layout used wedge plates to create unique angles on the buildings and this created half stud and quarter stud offsets to be filled in the alleyways and courtyards throughout the build. We were able to control the aesthetic of the build by creating a large pinterest board of inspiration pictures and starting our sections before adding other members so they could see what we were trying to achieve.
TBB: Let’s talk about the setting. Is the city based on any specific place? What is the significance of the name “Medinat al Musawrah”?
Michael: It means “walled city” in Arabic. Kind of a nod to one of the original inspirations. It’s located somewhere in the middle east, but nowhere in particular. That’s part of the fun of fantastical stuff like this. I’d say it also kind of exists out of time, but around the 1970s, with maybe some heightened technology here and there. In my mind it’s either somewhere in the Nile Delta or the Levant. Goerge added a massive banner to his pyramid that read “Machines or Martyrs,” so there’s an element of revolution. One fun thing I noticed at Brickfair was that people from this part of the world would ask us things like “Is this (city where I am from)?” and it was a different city each time. People vibed with it. It’s Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Jerusalem, Casablanca, Beirut, Istanbul. It’s anywhere at any time.
George:
We want a wide variety of buildings within this world and we pulled a lot of influence from Arabic and Islamic architecture. With these buildings, the ground floor shop has likely changed hands over time. It may have been a garage and now it is a shop for repairing A/C units.
Tobias: A building that fits perfectly reflects the contrasting and blending styles often found in the region – leftovers of European colonial architecture, rich geometric forms from Islamic tradition, and a general sense of clutter found in the commercial district of any major city. Cell phone kiosks, cafes, shwarma places. I think signage was a big part of this too, keeping accurate Arabic script was made easy by our one member Brian Carter, who is fluent.
Michael: At a first glance Arabic seems like a very un-lego language to work with. SNOT lettering techniques seem like they wouldn’t work. Too much curvature. But once you have even a basic grasp on the writing system it becomes a bit easier. We did a lot of work examining different fonts and translating them into Lego, especially George. Also, there’s a huge amount of calligraphic shorthand in Arabic. I won’t go into specifics but there’s so many different styles of script that use simplified elements that you really do have a ton of choice in how you actually render the writing in bricks. I found that flex tube works well, and all the arabic signage on my sections are built in this way. Other people didn’t seem to have much of an issue though. Tobias used round plates, roller skates, teeth, and all manner of other parts to achieve the “cafe” sign on his section. George knocked it out of the park with his SNOT Arabic.
TBB: Can each you speak about your contribution to the city?
Michael: Aside from planning and coordination, I contributed 3 buildings on the “back” side of the display. I tried to set an example by doing some kind of unique combination of aesthetics and functions in each of them. Combining core features of architecture seen in the middle east both old and new. All kinds of arches, prefab concrete construction, an ochre color palette, and occupied rooftops.
Michael: The corner store I made had this more traditional-looking first level which transitioned up to skinny tall apartments with more contemporary looks. The middle building looked distinctly older with some foiled archways and mashrabiyyas, and housed a small covered marketplace. The third building had a kebab shop, and drew inspiration from other parts of the mediterranean like Italy, and particularly the work of the artist Alariko. Later on I pointed out these features to my collaborators as something to aim for. It wasn’t exhaustive by any means, and I think everyone did a wonderful job finding their own inspiration.
George: The pyramid itself is largely based on La Pyramide in the Ivory Coast, when the building was in use it featured shops and markets on the bottom floor and workspaces on the upper floors. I replicated that same structure in my interpretation of the building. I came across it looking through a variety of Middle Eastern and African inspiration on Pinterest. The shaping of the building seemed like a fun challenge to take on. I began within the week after Brickworld 2023 and finished just before Brickfair Virginia 2024.
George: I can’t give any estimate to the parts used, but I certainly required a few Bricklink orders to get it completed. I initially tried to match the 3 sided pyramid shape and ended working through a few variations of the design in Stud.io before settling on the one I used in the final version. Keeping the consistent pyramid shape from floor to floor took a lot of trial and error to find the right spacing and panel design to match up to La Pyramide. Opting for a more rectangular shape allowed it to fit into our final city plan layout better too.
Tobias: My contribution was a colonial Algiers-esque Haussmannian housing block with mashrabiya additions and roof terraces. A haphazard addition at the end of the block broke the original floor plan we had decided on but didn’t interfere with others’ contributions, so it all worked out. That decrepit, teetering sand green and white building at the edge of my contribution was based on a building in Turkey that would not stop popping up on Pinterest for me. I can’t begin to estimate part count, but my final solid block was about 22-ish pounds. My block actually pretty seamlessly slipped into the city grid. I think there were a couple changes to one adjacent plate built by Luke, but nothing major.
TBB: Middle Eastern architecture hasn’t had nearly the attention of European, Chinese, and Japanese styles in official or fan sets, but lately it seems to be inspiring a lot of MOCs. Why do you think that is?
Michael: Well I hope the answer is because we are doing it. Eastern Asian stylings of course have a long history of being a focal point in science fiction, which has had dissertations written analyzing why. European and American buildings are of course the “default” to us because it’s where we live already. The Middle East either draws up Orientalist fantasy or War. You can see this in Lego too. Islamic architecture seems to be the realm of castle builds or military builds. I’m a bit tired of that trope though and that’s why I am seeking to change it with this build. Not to get too philosophical but the way that the middle east is kind of shut out of sci-fi or speculative fiction contributes to its perception as being a place without a future, condemned to be a place of the past or the place where war happens. Everything is of course tied to the past but I think it is just as deserving of a future. I could literally write a thesis on this topic but I won’t go too much further.
Tobias: Not entirely sure why it seems to be popping off now, but I can absolutely see why it grabs builders’ attention. There’s a nice combination of traditional rational patterns/geometry found in Islamic architecture and 19th and 20th-century forms, so you can really experiment.
George: I think some of that has come from people getting tired of building within those themes and wanting to branch out and take on new challenges. LEGO has also introduced a lot of new arches and colors the last few years that lend themselves well to replicating Arabic and Islamic architecture. A lot of the builds in recent years have been military related when it comes to representing the Middle East as well. That was something we wanted to stray from in this depiction of that area. The focus tends to be on the conflict and less on the architecture. This was appealing to us as we could pull influences from different regions and not have to focus on representing just one area of the Middle East. It is always fun to try to take on new challenges and build within new constraints and themes, everyone should try to branch out and take on new themes when they can.
TBB: Let’s talk about the setting up a collaboration like this at BrickFair. Did all of the planning pay off?
Michael: The greatest challenge we faced were the tables and tablecloths. In previous years Todd let us have a standalone table that we fabricated ourselves and were able to keep level, but this year no dice. The Brickfair tables were such a pain for setup. We managed, but between the sag of the tables themselves and the pinching of the tablecloth between sections, it was a bit of a nightmare for setup. At this point the lesson I’ve learned is to beg Todd earlier for a standalone table. I’m not above bribing.
George: Throughout the building process I made sure that my sections were able to be split into smaller pieces for transportation. It also made it easier for me to work on the internal structure and add details to the shops on the bottom floor of La Pyramide. Moving the sections worked fairly well and the pyramid travelled well. I did a poor job of creating enough structure on one of the accompanying buildings and it imploded on the way to the convention. Thankfully it did not take long to put back together and everyone else had minor things to repair on their sections. We were able to get all of the sections together on the first full day of setting up at the convention. There were a couple of hiccups with some sections not being the right dimensions, but we had enough time to do some building and modification on site.
Tobias: Much of the pre-display logistics centered on getting all the builds to and from the convention hall. Some builders could not be present for the convention and some had to leave early, so figuring out who could grab a build in one state and get it to Virginia on behalf of others popped up a couple of times. I’ve still got Ryan Keeth’s contribution bubble wrapped in my parent’s attic in Maryland. Mike actually picked up my block from Brooklyn as I didn’t want to chance taking it on an Amtrak. Once on site, everything came together pretty flawlessly, save a few internal border issues. George’s Pyramid arrived a tad later I believe, but it was corner-facing so there weren’t any fitting issues. Ben Lefke and Jack Spitler saved the day by building the sloping highway at the front of the display, which tied the streetscape together and blocked a bunch of confetti-colored filler brick.
TBB: Tobias, Michael mentioned you using a film to document the project. What was the inspiration behind this choice?
Tobias: I felt like the grit and minutiae of urban life we captured could be documented as if it were a real streetscape. I don’t shoot street photography in real life, so I guess this was a little outlet to try it out. My girlfriend had brought a film camera to document our trip and I wanted to see if all the warm hues and slice-of-life vignettes could be brought to life in tiny, grainy images. There were a ton of photos developed, some more successful than others.
TBB: We hear the collaboration will be returning at BrickFair NoVa this summer. What changes can we expect? And will the project continue after this encore?
Michael: We do have the final iteration planned for Brickfair NoVa this year yes. I think after this year it will be done, don’t wanna drag it out past its prime. Blake came out like gangbusters to finish his two claims. Thus far he is the only newcomer that is finished, but I’ll start cracking the whip so that you can feature some more folks. Jack Spitler has some heat in the works. So does that guy BasedPrion.
George: We are in the process of tripling the size for the upcoming BFVA 2025 convention. We are looking to expand the roads and bring in more builders to help capture this world on a larger scale. The primary focus of the initial collab was the buildings themselves, with this iteration we are expanding that to include more roads, more significant elevation changes, and adding in a water section to capture the coastal vibe. Some of the collaborators from the 2024 build are rebuilding or modifying their sections to embrace a larger overall footprint.
Tobias: Mike and I are both adding large municipal and housing structures to go with George’s Pyramide. A highway and harbor are gonna cut through it all. We’ve recruited a ton of builders to take the seventy or so buildings that will make up the scene. A custom wood table, not unlike New Hashima’s, will hopefully eliminate issues that a well-used generic folding table provided by Dulles Expo might present.
TBB: What are your hopes for the future of Medinat al Musawrah? What do you hope people will take away? What will you keep?
Michael: I hope that our collaborators and the audience come away from this with a greater appreciation for different architectural and cultural traditions. I hope that other people are inspired to take on massive collabs like this and break away from perceived grid constraints. But most of all I hope that it’s good enough to stop here. I think we will have said all that needs to be said and then be able to move on to the next thing. I’ll probably continue some architectural pieces out of my own interest, and I encourage others to do the same.
George: After any of these big collabs I always take everything apart save for a few small things. As much as I would love to keep everything I ever built together I don’t have the pieces or space to do that. I really enjoy the fresh start after sorting everything back out and it allows me to fully commit to the next project I want to take on. The only thing I am planning on saving from this collab is the Pakistani Jingle Truck I made. I generally try to keep one or two things from a collab. I still have the dragon sign I made for my apartment building in the New Hashima collab along with the monorail train.
Tobias: Dismantle. I break all my shit from Brickfair either during the convention’s closing or shortly after getting home. We’re hoping the legacy is people wanting to build more cool things in the future. And the Beyond the Brick, of course. We don’t wanna ride the display into redundancy by keeping it around for another five years. It should say all it needs to say by August of this year.
TBB: Two years is a long time to focus on one project. Any thoughts on what you’d want to work on next?
George: We are looking at making a big THUGLUG anniversary build for BFVA 2026 and going back to the historical themes that they have worked with in the past. This is a project they have wanted to do for a number of years. There are a couple of dream projects that we have thrown around that I am sure we will get to someday. I would really love to do a build capturing small town America in the post war/mid century era with a train running through it. As I have gotten older I have drifted more towards town and train themed MOCs from the military and apoc styles I started with.
Tobias: My girlfriend and I really want to build a huge castle. We’ve picked out a color scheme and everything, just need to start chipping away at it. For next year (or maybe the one after), the ThugLUG group chat has been buzzing about a Battle of Blair Mountain historical diorama. Really cool story behind it and some crazy topography to recreate.
TBB: Do you have any advice for our readers who might be interested in working on a collaborative LEGO build for the first time?
Michael: Develop your own systems and modules. Could be anything. Set a couple constraints but not too many. Above all else break the mold. Find what inspires you outside of Lego and try to develop that. Too many times things become a telephone game where a build is inspired by another build and it becomes an infinite chain where the original inspiration and spirit is lost. Things get garbled.
George: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Knowing your limits on what you can contribute while still providing detailed builds is the most important thing. In my experience I would much rather someone take a smaller section and put more time and effort into the details than taking a large section with sparser detailing. Like any good group project, working collaboratively with the other members is important and always bringing what makes your building style unique to the table. If someone wants you to be a part of a collab they want you to build authentically to your style.
Tobias: Just get some of your friends together and do it. It’s much easier to create some sort of unified vision that you can execute well when you know the people and feel comfortable disagreeing or working through build critiques. Once you’ve started ironing out what you want it to look like, ask around. People are more often than not very receptive to a collaboration invitation!
The post The living history of a fictional LEGO city: building Medinat al Musawrah [Interview] appeared first on The Brothers Brick.
Leave a Reply