The $140,000 Lego model, and other confessions of a blockhead

Ryan McNaught swears he doesn’t take his work home with him. But when you live and breathe Lego like The Brickman does, the dividing line between work and play can be pretty porous.

“For Christmas every year, I ask for a Lego set,” says McNaught, the resident expert on TV’s Lego Masters.

It’s not that he’s short of bricks; in his warehouse in an industrial estate near Melbourne Airport, he has millions of pieces of the stuff. It’s just that the buzz he got as a three-year-old receiving his first box, containing a small blue rowboat, has never really dissipated.

“I still love that feeling of getting a Lego set. Opening the box, the Danish air comes out and hits you in the face and it smells like Lego,” he rhapsodises. “The feeling of anticipation, and then going through the instructions, I don’t know what I’m making yet, what this bit is going to be for, I’ve never thought of using bricks that way, or that technique is totally new, or there’s a new part. I absolutely love it.”

I’ve met McNaught for lunch at the Tullamarine branch of Three Blue Ducks, the casual restaurant chain in which Andy Allen, one-time winner and now a co-host of MasterChef Australia, is a co-owner. The focus here is on locally sourced produce, and while the menu is pretty similar to what you’d find in most self-respecting gastropubs these days, the food is generous and delicious.

It’s hot, so we take an outside table with a view of the massive UrbnSurf pool, where perfectly formed waves are pumped out at regular intervals for wetsuit-clad surfers to ride over and over again.

I order the fish of the day (barramundi), which comes on a bed of roasted fennel; he orders a chicken parma with chips, and I choose the Szechuan pepper squid as an entree to share (it’s very good but unfortunately, all three dishes arrive at the same time).

How’s the chook, I ask him.

“Great,” he says. “Too much, to be honest, but that’s OK.”

Could you replicate this meal out of Lego, do you think?

He pauses, but only for a moment.

“Yes,” he says. “But it wouldn’t have been nearly as tasty, and you might have needed a trip to the dentist afterwards.”

The spur for this chat isn’t Lego Masters, on which McNaught has appeared as judge and resident expert since its first blockbuster season in 2019. Rather, it is the exhibition, Curiosity: Building Breakthroughs in LEGO Bricks, at Bendigo’s Discovery Science and Technology Centre (the all-caps LEGO is how the Danish toy is officially styled).

Originally commissioned for Questacon, the national science centre in Canberra, the Bendigo show features a life-size replica of the Mars Rover Perseverance, a 7.5-metre tall rocket, and a periodic table in which the elements are brought to life with objects in which the elements are found.

“I call it education by stealth,” says McNaught. “If I say to my kids, ‘Hey, let’s go do some learning today’, they’re going to look at me and go, ‘You’re the lamest dad in the world’. But if I say, ‘We’re going to go play some Lego today’, off we go. It’s very nefarious and sneaky, but sometimes you have to fight beneath the belt to get their attention, particularly in the world of devices, right?”

For the record, I’m pretty sure McNaught is being hyperbolic here; his twins are 18 now, and have largely put the blocks aside. Any efforts by Dad to con them with this learning-by-stealth malarkey would almost certainly incite a dose of lame-shaming, no matter how well disguised.

While the TV show has made McNaught famous, it’s commissions like this exhibition that have kept him busy since he decided to trade a career in IT for full-time play in 2008.

Like many a childhood Lego fan, McNaught put away childish things in his teens. It wasn’t until his children were born that he picked up the bricks again. “I had a 20-odd-year gap of not playing with Lego,” he says.

After high school, he found his way into IT, starting on the help desk and eventually working his way up to chief information officer. But during a meeting one day, he realised he’d had enough.

“The managing director said, ‘We need to have a meeting about the number of meetings we’re having’,” he recalls. “And my eyes rolled back in my head, and I knew at that moment that I needed to do something else, though I didn’t know what that thing was.”

As luck would have it, McNaught had recently got his hands on a Lego Mindstorms kit, built around the programmable yellow Lego block. And as inclination would have it, he soon set about hacking the block so the robot he was building could be controlled from his iPad (another piece of recently acquired tech).

It took some doing – about six months of quietly tinkering away after hours – but once he was done, he uploaded the program to a Mindstorms forum so others could take advantage of it.

People loved it, but Lego’s legal team were less impressed. “I got a cease-and-desist letter,” he says. “But about two weeks later, I got a very different letter from a different division in Lego, saying, ‘This is just awesome, let’s do some stuff together’.”

That was the beginning of his journey to becoming a Certified Lego Professional, one of just 24 worldwide (and the only one in the southern hemisphere). It took a couple of years to get there – including a job interview at a convention in the United States that he didn’t even realise was a job interview – but it was the change he’d been looking for, and he’s never looked back.

The role, he says, is about pushing the limits of what you can do with Lego. Each of the 24 specialists has their own style, their own way of reinventing the blocky wheel. But they’re not employees, and they don’t get paid by Lego, except when Lego, as a client, commissions them to do something.

When McNaught decided to try to make a living from his hobby, he and his wife figured they could afford to give it six months before he’d have to go back to IT. He started in his garage, taking whatever commissions he could land. “I would do anything, literally. I would do rich kids’ birthday parties, a Lego party; I would make a custom model. If anyone wanted anything, you name it, I would do it, just to pay the bills.”

After two years, he took on a co-worker. By the time he moved to Tullamarine, there were five. Now, there are 38 full-time staff, designing, building and managing sculptures, installations and exhibitions all over the world. (This year, Brickman’s work is showing in Canada, France, South Korea, the Philippines, the United States and Australia.)

After lunch, he takes me on a tour of Brickman HQ. There are boxes and boxes of Lego, sorted by colour and block size. At any one time, there are between 2 million and 10 million blocks on site, all of them bought in bulk from Billund, Denmark.

“It’s very much a just-in-time manufacturing style; it’s no different to making a car,” he says. “We never get a part custom-made, we only use standard Lego pieces, and the reason for that is the aspiration part of it. If you’ve got this many Lego bricks at home, you, too, can make this.”

There was one exception to that rule, he concedes. When his crew was making a life-size C3P0 for the Star Wars exhibition, he decided standard-issue yellow bricks weren’t going to cut it.

“So for the first time in my life, I had some special Lego bricks made for me. They cost about four euros a brick. Two-by-fours, two-by-sixes, all the standard-sized bricks, about 20,000 in all.”

So, that’s about 80,000 euros?

“Yeah, about $140,000, for one life-size sculpture. I’m not going to call it the pinnacle of my career because my career is not over yet, but it was pretty special.”

That career has taken McNaught all over the world, introducing him to fellow blockheads and allowing him to indulge another great passion, marathon running.

He’s had to give it up recently – at 53, he says, “my body’s given up on me, the knees sound like a sack of marbles when I walk” – but he ran 18 full marathons before retiring.

His wife Robin was a runner, too, and together they ran on every continent bar Antarctica. “I did all the majors, Boston, London, Berlin, Tokyo, Chicago,” he says. His favourite? Probably the one through an African safari park.

I bet you did that one in a sprint, I venture.

“It wasn’t about the time in that particular marathon,” he says, pulling out his phone to show me a photo of the elephant that blocked the track at the 26-kilometre mark and stubbornly held its ground for 10 minutes.

The most memorable, though, was in North Korea, which functioned as a stage for propaganda more than athletics.

“You ran from the Olympic Stadium, which never had the Olympics by the way, to the power plant and back,” he says. “And this power plant was coal-fired, lots of smoke – global warming was caused by this one plant.”

While the foreign runners stuck strictly to the track through Pyongyang, the home country runners cut corners at will. “So the winner of the marathon did it in one hour and 20 minutes,” he says, laughing (for reference, the official world record currently stands at just over two hours).

There may not be any more marathons on the horizon for McNaught, but the work that has taken him around the world is likely to continue for a long time yet.

“Every day, no matter what, I think about things I’d like to make out of Lego,” he says. “I think my retirement will come when I’m either not adding to that list or I’ve run out of things to build.”

CURIOSITY: Building Breakthroughs in LEGO® Bricks is at Discovery Science & Technology Centre, Bendigo, until November 29. Details: discovery.asn.au

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