Brick Club

Posted on: 19 April 2023 by Jessica Ford-Powell and Lauren Ball in 2023 posts

Brick club is a new extra-curricular experience for students and staff in Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology to enhance our sense of community and belonging through serious play. Brick club provides a space in which we use LEGO to create models and art, but it is much more than this.

It is a playful space that gives everyone the opportunity to be involved in a collaborative problem-solving project or individual creative expression that can be shared.  Brick club has been supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Beacon Project fund.

For our first session of Brick Club, we wanted to focus on the principal of community, and what that meant to people. The idea was to give people the freedom to create whatever they wanted, inspired by that prompt, allowing conversations and ideas to develop because of this.

We weren’t sure how many people would attend the first Brick Club, because there was a conflicting event occurring at the same time, meaning we had to change the scheduled time last minute. We also weren’t sure how much the news of the club would have spread, and were expecting quite a low turnout.

To our surprise then, quite a few people did attend! People really seemed to take to the creative prompt, and we had all sorts of builds occurring, including a human sacrifice, a Mesolithic village, and some more abstract buildings. More importantly, people seemed very free in their conversations with each other, and they all seemed to enjoy the relaxation. We asked them at the end if people appreciated the prompt or wanted something a bit more specific, and the feedback that we got was that it would be good to have something more restricted alongside the concept prompt, such as a period within history.

We’re hoping that, given how interested people were and how quickly they relaxed, that the principal of Brick Club will spread fast ensuring a higher number of people each week. We’ve already had enquiries from students about whether people who are not ACE students would be allowed to attend.

Below you can see some images of various builds made by people during the club.

Originating in Bronze Age Greece,  mosaic has been a popular art form for the decoration of buildings and plazas for millennia. The mosaic floor designs of classical antiquity are almost legends in their own right, with the Greeks' geometric designs and the Romans' detailed designs being recognisable to those with even a passive interest in history. Therefore, it felt like a fitting theme for the 2^nd session of Brick Club. After welcoming the attendees and offering round some biscuits, a short PowerPoint of mosaics was shown to spark inspiration before the LEGO building commenced.

The attendees, primarily a mix of undergraduates and postgraduates from the Department of Archaeology, Classics, and Egyptology, with a few joining from other departments, appeared to enjoy the time to relax while getting creative with LEGO. By the end of the session, the room had been filled with consistent chatter between new and old friends, creating a wonderful atmosphere that people left with a smile.

Designs that were wholly original or inspired by any period were encouraged, including multi-level structures or scenes. This resulted in many unique pieces, some of which you can see below:

Scenes: Palaeolithic cave painter (left) and pirate treasure (right)

A 3D design

Iconographic mosaic designs

Geometric mosaic designs

Please come and join us in the ACE department postgraduate social space for the next Brick Club session on Thursday 20^th April, from 3.30 pm to 5 pm!

Follow us on Instagram for any updates (@brickclub_liverpool)