Travelling Bricks
Over one million LEGO® bricks assemble this astonishing exhibition of giant model vehicles: from horse-drawn carts and carriages, bicycles, tractors, and ships, race cars, trains, planes and spacecraft. Over the centuries, the speed at which we travel from A to B has rapidly accelerated, and with every step, our world grows smaller. A constant companion, LEGO® has kept pace, fantastically modelling our advancements in transport for young and old alike, the world over. As relevant forty years ago as they are in the here and now, LEGO® is timeless. Celebrating this journey in a touring exhibition, Travelling Bricks, will be making its Dutch premiere at CODA Museum Apeldoorn, from 21 April to 25 August 2024. Discover everything you’ve ever wanted to know about transport and more. Plus, with more than 200,000 bricks for you to play with, you can let your imagination run wild: build your own car, bicycle, boat, rocket, or train, or create a vehicle that no one has ever seen before!
Travelling Bricks lets you explore to your heart’s content as you voyage across land, sea, sky, and space. In sixty scenes built by professional LEGO-artists, it features over 120 LEGO models including icons such as the Titanic, here more than seven metres long! Or how about a three-metre rocket, a spectacular spaceship, or a Boeing 747? And of course, there will be an extensive programme of indoor and outdoor activities this spring and summer, where you can play, build, and experiment for yourself.
Activity programme
During the Travelling Bricks exhibition, CODA will host a wide range of activities in partnership with various partners. Tour de Transport – around the LEGO® block, is a cycle tour of architectural highlights and other special places in the surrounding Veluwe region. This tour is available in brochure form at CODA, or as a free download from www.coda-apeldoorn.nl/tourdetransport. During the tour, you can take part in miniature photography workshops using LEGO®.
CODA Studio will also hold various activities inspired by the Building a New World exhibition, and CODA ExperienceLab will offer LEGO® robots, afternoon LEGO® building workshops, and other attractions. In addition, the ExperienceLab Showroom will stage an exhibition entitled, Building and Prototyping –LEGO® as a Design Tool. Here, you can help to build a city from white LEGO® bricks, explore an animation studio, and see LEGO® jewellery made by students at nearby vocational college, Zadkine Vakschool Schoonhoven.
The Pixelbricks Challenge lets you create familiar scenes and figures using LEGO®, and then photograph your creation somewhere outdoors for the chance to win exciting prizes! Travelling Bricks also includes a programme of workshops, including one on Brickpainting led by the artist Ernesto Lemke from the Dutch and Belgian version of the LEGO® Masters TV show. Activity tickets are available at www.coda-apeldoorn.nl/eventbrite or the Activity Agenda at www.coda-apeldoorn.nl.
CODA Archive and Heritage
During the LEGO exhibition, CODA Archief will focus on the history of transport. Apeldoorn has long been an important transport and trading hub whose favourable location led it to grow faster and bigger than the surrounding villages. The region is also home to vehicle manufacturers such as Sparta, which makes bicycles and mopeds. The town’s rapid growth was later boosted by the building of the Apeldoorn Canal and the railway network. If you’d like to know more about the history of Apeldoorn and its surroundings, go to www.hetgroteverhaalvanapeldoorn.nl or visit the five hotspots in CODA Centrale Bibliotheek.
Building a new world
Want to dig deeper into construction? From 30 June to 29 September, CODA is also presenting the group exhibition, Building a new world. This exhibition focuses on the work of five artists, and takes its inspiration from the 1963 manifesto New Babylon by visual artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920–2005). Describing his vision of a future city, he projects a place in which play and human creativity play a central role. Alongside work by Nieuwenhuys himself, the exhibition also includes sculptures and drawings by Gerbrand Burger (b. 1976), Floris Hovers (b. 1976), Pip Passchier (b. 1995), and Rob Voerman (b. 1966). With their own distinct perspectives, vision and working methods, each of these artists is building a new world; some project utopian views of a distant sustainable future, while others yearn for the structures that defined their own childhoods. Their explorations of form refer to an urban architecture of apartment buildings, playgrounds, parks, and shelters. Their works examine the architecture around us using items such as an intuitive set of toy wooden construction blocks, a kite sail, or trampoline cables, and express ominous visions of a future world in which rebuilding and sustainability are persistent themes.