At Brick Slopes 2025, I got to talk with Brooke Norman (BrickNorms) about one of the wildest first-time convention displays I’ve ever seen: a huge, life-size LEGO Berlin Wall. Brooke and her family built a 14-foot-wide, 12-foot-tall wall made from 49 modular “cinder block” sections—each one packed with roughly 8,500 LEGO pieces—adding up to over 600,000 pieces and about 2,100 pounds when they stopped counting. What makes it even crazier is that this was their first ever MOC, and they finished it during the show—so watching it come together felt like performance art. We dig into the engineering behind it: compression towers, SNOT brackets for tension, plating for stability, and the fact that the sections don’t “connect” in the usual way—they’re set together as a compression build. Brooke also walks me through the art choices: a West Berlin “colorful rebellion” side and an East Berlin side that captures the creepiness and tension of the wall’s history, including references to activist/graffiti artist Thierry Noir, a spooky “East Berlin Mickey,” and a Russian quote tied to the era. The biggest takeaway for me is how LEGO can turn something painful from history into a powerful conversation starter—built by a community, just like the real wall was covered by many hands over time.