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 1 of the series, “Dream Park Theme Park” (2/5/2020), Christian and I assembled Spaceland, a retro-space themed amusement park complete with a spinning UFO swings ride, a crashed-alien-spaceship-turned-café, a modern visitor center, a laser-gun shooting gallery, intergalactic storefronts, and an enormous, motorized Ferris wheel… all built in just 15 hours
Read on for my special dissection of Spaceland. This model became the winning build in its week, earning Christian and me the coveted Golden Brick!
The First Impression
As soon as Christian and I learned that our challenge would be to build a theme park with at least one motorized ride, I knew straightaway that I wanted a Ferris wheel to be our centerpiece. I’ll be honest, there was a little bit of a “mind game” strategy at play, here… I figured that the other contestants would dismiss a Ferris wheel for their own attractions as too easy a choice, and as too likely to be chosen by another team. Since I expected that everyone else would shy away from this ride—that they’d choose to skip the obvious—I guessed that the Ferris wheel would be open to me and Christian! I guessed right, and ours was the only Ferris wheel in the Dream Park.
Beyond considerations like these, a Ferris wheel has two main advantages in a competition setting. First, its motion—just a single axis rotation—is relatively simple; therefore, it doesn’t take as long to refine or test as a more complex ride would. Second, the Ferris wheel gives you enormous “bang for your buck;” it’s easy to achieve large scale without having to fill huge volume with thousands of bricks. Not that a wheel like this doesn’t pose challenges. One of the LEGO Masters judges, Brickmaster Jamie, correctly pointed out during our final critique that the geometry on a wheel like this is quite complex, especially given the fixed lengths of yellow-colored axles. I’m very proud to have pulled it off here.
The choice to pursue a retro space theme for our park came from Christian, who discovered some alien and astronaut minifigures in the Brick Pit early into the challenge. I’m so grateful he found these! They became templates establishing the color and tone for the rest of Spaceland.
Layout, Composition, and Color
We chose a “plot of land” for the challenge which had a large, open space on purpose; we needed that space for the Ferris wheel. Our portion of the fixed monorail track—which ran through everyone’s plots in different ways—bisected our “plot” diagonally, leaving a large empty corner for the wheel, but also a good chunk of space to its other side. On this side, we decided to include a second, simpler and smaller ride: a spinning swings ride styled like an alien UFO. Two rides are better than one, right?
At a point about halfway through the 15 hours, Christian and I took a step back together and looked at our work thus far. We noticed that we had a bit of a composition imbalance: the Ferris wheel was red, yellow, and white (“astronaut colors”), while the swing ride was purple, green, and grey (“alien colors”). The two rides didn’t feel like they were even part of the same park! Our strategy then became about balancing and unifying our plot through color. We determined the placement of other major attractions, like the visitor center, the galleries, and the monorail station to visually balance the park as best we could. For example: the Spaceland marquis consciously plays most into “astronaut colors” to counterpoint with the wheel, while the crashed spaceship café is the best “alien colors” ambassador on the wheel’s side of the monorail track.
We designed several other repeating elements, like the white street lamps, the grey pathways, and the micro-UFOs, and spread these across our plot to build further unity into our model.
The Crashed Spaceship
The crashed-alien-spacecraft-turned-café is perhaps the most creative aspect of Spaceland. Christian and I really loved the idea that at the site of first contact between their species, humans and aliens wouldn’t be fighting with their lasers… no, they’d decide to build a theme park! This crashed spaceship makes Spaceland a build about peace, fun, and embracing diversity.
Ironically, this ship, the key to the whole build, almost got tossed in our discard pile. What you see here, the hefty ship crash-landed in the ground, was originally built by Christian to be the top of our spinning UFO ride. However, we realized midway into our ride’s design that the the thing was far too heavy, and its asymmetrical design—while awesome—wasn’t conducive to spinning levelly.
We felt so frustrated by the time we’d spent on the ship, imagining it’d been wasted. Our desire not to backtrack, not to have “lost time,” actually saved us. We decided re-purposing the craft; after all, that was the only thing that made sense to do. There was a big open space in front of the Ferris wheel and, when Christian had the idea to place the ship crash-landed there, one thing really led to another and clicked!
Dining Experience
Turning the ship into a café felt like the obvious thing to do, mostly because Spaceland guests had nowhere to eat, yet. Christian designed the scene atop the ship. As usual, his prodigious skills with minifigs turned the area into a total highlight of the build. I love how he dressed up some of the aliens at waiters—it was truly genius. Everyone is drinking either purple or green vials. These, Christian and I decided, are special Spaceland beverages brought over by the aliens! A few full-size chickens sit roasting over the ship’s crash-landing flames.
Unity Concert
I think these two minifigures are my very favorite part of our build. A pair of musicians, one alien and one human, playing a saxophone and a guitar… the absurdity, incongruity, and humor in this little vignette are too perfect! And, more than words could ever do, the existence of this duet speaks to the atmosphere of collaboration and joy permeating all of Spaceland.
Visitor Center
I took point on building our visitor center, a modern-looking rectangular building placed just past the marquis. This inclusion felt like an obvious choice to us… after all, what good is an amusement park if it doesn’t charge $100+ a ticket? We had a lot of fun designing the path Spaceland’s minifig-sized guests would have to follow, ensuring that there was a checkpoint before entry, that we had stanchions up to stop people running on the flowerbeds, and that all our landmarks could be reached by wide, inviting pathways.
I’m quite proud of my “pixelated” windows design, a motif that appears not just in the front-facing wall of the visitor center, but also on the marquis, atop the monorail stop, and even in the gondolas of the Ferris wheel. It hits perfectly in the sweet spot of our retro theme, providing extra texture to some areas that might have felt flat otherwise.
Ferris Wheel Gondolas
Speaking of the gondolas, these are the part of the Ferris wheel that tie it into Spaceland’s theme. As Christian and I built, both our on-the-floor producers and the Brickmasters expressed concerns that the Ferris wheel didn’t feel very “retro-space.” And I’ll admit: it wasn’t, for a while. I needed to focus on nailing the mechanism, structure, and integrity of a generic Ferris wheel before could address any special dressings.
I knew I wanted the gondolas to be little rocket ships as soon as we chose our park’s theme. Snub-nosed with flaring tails, these feel very 50s sci-fi to me. Plus, red is an extremely retro-futuristic color! I worked white and yellow into the rockets’ color schemes to unify them with the wheel at large.
There were two main challenges to overcome when designing the gondolas. First, they had to balance decently well. Front and back needed to weigh about the same, and have similar leverage, so that the gondolas would hang straight down from their places on the wheel even as it moved. The second challenge was ensuring that the gondolas wouldn’t collide at any position on the Ferris wheel, so that when the ride turned everything went smoothly and none of the gondolas caught on each other.
I think I was the most flustered when producing these gondolas. They were one of the last things I put together for Spaceland, and I had to mass-produce sixteen of them! Worse, if any change needed to happen, or I discovered an adjustment needed to be made, I’d have to do it sixteen times over.
Will Arnett, Secret Agent
Christian and I included this minifigure as a tribute to our LEGO Masters host, comedic actor Will Arnett. We placed an alien painter “in trouble” on the wheel, dangling by a hand from one of the gondolas. Obviously, Secret Agent Arnett had to climb to the rescue! We relished including this, and dozens of other pockets of funny story into Spaceland.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions or comments about this model, feel free to leave them in the comments below.