In the winter of 2020, my friend Christian Cowgill and I appeared in the first American season of LEGO Masters, a reality-style building competition show. For Episode 2 of the series, “Space Smash” (2/12/2020), Christian and I built Catastrophe at the Crescent, an unorthodox space station designed to be blown up by real-life explosives.
Read on for my special dissection of this model’s process, design choices, and more!
Initial Conception
When we received this challenge—create a model designed to be destroyed—Christian and I were super excited. Its violent prompt was unlike anything either of us had ever built for before… under normal circumstances, after all, I do my best not to damage any bricks in my collection! Our excitement was compounded by receiving, by luck of the draw, our first choice means of destruction: explosives. Since a portion of our judging on this challenge depended on how the model looked when it blew up, the resultant “Big Bang” would act as a dramatic reckoning for our build.
A space station was the first idea that occurred to to us in our brainstorm. Initially, we envisioned a cluster of bio-spheres, each with its own sub-function for the interstellar community living aboard. However, we quickly canned this atomic structure for a few reasons. One, many other teams were pursuing spherical builds; two, we figured we didn’t have time to put together enough spheres to achieve the concept fully; and three, we couldn’t conceive of a way to create translucent domes using the parts available to us.
So, sphere morphed into disc. At this point, I thought to use curved railroad track elements to create a perfect circle at the scale we wanted. However, I worried that a disc shape, which would be similar to our Ferris wheel from the previous challenge, wouldn’t show off Christian and my range. By simply picking up the full circle, and bending it in half, we realized the skeleton of the finished Crescent. We thought this silhouette was cool, different, and eye-catching, so we went with it!
Color, Motifs, and Design Choices
Like our decision about its shape, our choice of vibrant blue for the Crescent arose as a reaction against Spaceland, our amusement park build. By coincidence, we’d already built in the space theme in episode 1, so we had to make deliberate choices to end up in a different realm of the sci-fi genre this time. Although we used yellow and red again as accent colors, we felt the need to turn to something fresh for a primary color. Blue seemed dramatic and spacey, especially when I employed multiple shades—regular, light, dark, and transparent—and contrasted them with bright, warm hues. I really like the look of the blue on this build, particularly since it masks all the grey of the train track elements.
I’ve got a funny story about grey to share—a small detail of this build that, unfortunately, didn’t make it to air. Brickmaster Amy had expressed her skepticism about Christian and my choice of grey for the color scheme of Spaceland, our amusement park. On this build, we took her critique and opted to use grey as an accent, rather than a primary, color… but we couldn’t resist including a little inside joke, too! I left one of the top portions of the Crescent starkly grey, and Christian set up a minifigure painting it blue. This little vignette both played into our construction story and humorously demonstrated that we remembered Amy’s feedback.
Yellow arose naturally as a secondary color here, because it screams “under construction.” Plus, the 1x5x6 cross-lattice pieces were available in either that color or grey and, as I’ve discussed above, we didn’t want to use grey more than we needed to!
Another signature aspect of the Crescent, its hexagonal framework, arose to provide a solution to a tricky problem. We loved the shape of our space station, but needed a good way to fill in the extraordinarily unorthodox area created by its curving lines and sharp vertices. I figured out that we could build tessellating hexagons, with a tiny bit of curvature built in using Technic connectors, and string them up over these spaces. The curve wasn’t exactly the same as that of the Crescent, but it was close enough that in small sections, the discrepancy wouldn’t be noticeable. To my satisfaction, the hexagon motif still looked polished despite the fact that it didn’t cover all the area available. Again, our construction story helped in this regard.
Stability Versus Fragility
The central dichotomy at play on this build was between building “strong” and building “weak.” The Space Smash challenge called for both. On the one hand, contestants’ builds had to be constructed intentionally weakly, so that when their time of destruction came, they’d be able to shatter and explode impressively. On the other hand, since each team was required to carry their finished model a short distance onto the pedestal where it would meet its maker, a degree of resilience was required as well to survive that journey. Hitting the right balance was an extremely tricky endeavor, given the unorthodox shape Christian and I had decided to pursue on this model.
The railroad track elements we chose to use, while amazing for creating the sweeping curve we envisioned, turned out to be disadvantageous in two ways. First, they were some of the largest pieces available to us from the Brick Pit, and therefore unsuited to shattering “into a thousand pieces” in the way that the challenge demanded. And second, while the default connection between the track elements was wonderfully fragile—a flimsy double-click system designed to be used horizontally, rather than vertically—it turned out that “wonderfully fragile” was really “too fragile.” In the episode, you can see a few occasions when the Crescent crumbles as I’m trying to get it to stand. Christian and I ended up needing to reinforce a few of the easy-break joints between the tracks just to enable the thing to stand reliably up.
Speaking of standing: finding out how our creation would stay vertical on its own was quite a large challenge. We ended up designing a strong, black base into which we could anchor the front and side legs of the Crescent, thereby providing an actual foundation for our delicate structure and its ancillary vehicles. The base turned out to be one of my favorite portions of the build. Christian and I peppered it with “sparkling stars,” which were actually the butts of ninja swords, lances, and other metallic Minifigure accessories whose “business ends” were hidden within the black box. The base also allowed us to hover a few asteroids around the station.
A few other elements of the Crescent were made out of larger bricks, i.e., bricks with inherent stability. The game then became to ensure that the connections around each larger piece were as weak as possible. To make those Tehnic hexagons breakable, for example, I pushed each of their connections apart with 1/2 Technic bushings, that way the 1L axle nubs were reduced by half and made quite brittle. We also built those shipping containers, which use large 1x5x6 corrugated panels, in such a way that their walls could easily be blasted apart from the inside.
“Anti-Gravity” Considerations
One of the virtues of our open-concept build was that we could really highlight a stunning aspect of life in space: zero-gravity environments. We designed the Crescent, an airy latticework of delicate lines and curves, to look almost impossibly light and flimsy, like something that couldn’t exist in an environment with gravity. While our employment of negative space turned out to be detrimental to the Crescent’s eventual destruction, it did make for a beautiful model with a striking silhouette.
Beyond the structure of the thing, though, we employed lots of trans-clear elements and chains to position Minifigures, vehicles, asteroids, containers and even parts of the station so that they’d “float” at distances away from the Crescent. We posed characters upside-down to highlight that there’s no real sense of “up” in space. It was fun, trying to get things situated as crazily and separately as possible.
Vehicles and Containers
Christian spearheaded the spaceship designs for this build; he’s an expert vehicle building, so we agreed he should be the one to tackle the craft in our model. He ended up creating two awesome vehicles. The first of these was an industrial loader complete with a bubble cockpit, robotic arms in the front, and a pickup-truck-like bed in the back designed to hold our “shipping containers” full of different materials. The second one was a sleek white fighter, a craft with both interstellar and atmospheric capabilities. These craft belonged to our “space police,” who we imagined were monitoring and protecting the construction of the Crescent. I love the pair of fighters flying in formation over to the right of the station.
The red shipping containers provided an extra “oomph” to our build at a first glance… and these were designed to be the sources of “oomph” in our explosion, too! When designing Catastrophe at the Crescent, Christian and I intended for each of these little containers—which were packed full of colorful bricks—to contain a detonation charge. Our vision was that each of the containers would explode, sending its contents flying to, with luck, eviscerate the fragile lattices of the Crescent.
Each of these corrugated units bears a vibrant logo on its front, a preview of what’s held inside. I had fun designing these little sections, choosing the popping colors that would help our build sing. At the end, we included two “hazardous material” containers (the ones with black and yellow checkerboards), one “bio-material” box (the one with the green symbol), one chemical container (the purple-marked one at the top) and one aquarium, complete with a shark or two inside! Christian loves sharks.
Minifigure Vignettes
Designing Minifigures and making vignettes with them all over the model was one of the most fun parts of creating Catastrophe at the Crescent. Putting the body of the Crescent together was a thrilling experience, of course, but could also be stressful, especially when it collapsed midway through our build time. Christian, who knew how to support me in these nervewracking moments, encouraged me to work with Minifigures for a few minutes now and again as a way to productively decompress.
By equipping a standard LEGO construction worker with an orange life-vest, a little jetpack, and a standard racing helmet, we created the template for our workers. I was really happy we were able to make suitable astronauts, even out of common LEGO City bricks. Once we’d assembled a little task force of these characters, we would pose them doing construction business here or there on the space station. My favorites are the ones posed upside-down on the upper launchpad, the two swinging out to the side on a chain, and the one doing a paint job in the top corner.
A few other characters, like the space police, existed on the build too. They wore black fireman’s outfits with black helmets.
The Moment of Truth
The type, placement, and sequence of explosives used on our model were all enormous factors in how the Crescent would meet its titular Catastrophe. However, these were also factors that, ultimately, lay outside Christian and my control. During our pre-challenge briefing on the explosives, we were told our models would be exploded by little charges, about the size of the end of a pinkie finger, and that we’d be able to tell our demolitions expert where we wanted them situated within our build. Christian and I designed our model with these charges in mind, and asked the demolitions expert to put one charge in each of our red shipping containers.
However, due I think to the challenges of hiding the wires these charges required in such an open model as ours, the demolitions expert opted to use detonation cord instead. The det cord resulted in a “Big Bang” that went down a bit differently than what we’d planned on. Rather than the shipping containers, which we’d place strategically around the model and which contained colorful and surprising loads of bricks, acting as the origins of the explosion, they became mere casualties in a boom that originated closer to the model’s base. The boom we got was, unfortunately, a letdown with the Brickmasters. We didn’t end up in the bottom two, but didn’t win the week either.
Christian and I, of course, were not without blame for the way the explosion transpired. We chose to take certain risks, like making a build with tons of negative space, and one built structurally from some very large pieces. I can’t blame the demolitions expert for doing his job, either—the model did explode completely, and it did so in a safe and controlled way. I’m sure there are factors outside my knowledge about demolitions that precluded us from getting the explosives type or placement we originally envisioned. At the end of the day, Christian and I didn’t set ourselves up for success in the “bang” part of this challenge.
Nevertheless, I’m quite proud of Catastrophe at the Crescent. Christian and I put together a signature build with vibrant colors, superb shape, tons of impressive techniques, and a story of which we could be proud.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.