Describe the artwork: The cubic structural evolution project
By Nabil Sabio Azadi
'Presence' December 2025
This installation by Icelandic–Danish artist Olafur Eliasson fills the gallery with long, white tables piled high with thousands of small white LEGO bricks. The tables form a wide rectangular surface, low enough for both children and adults to reach comfortably.
Spread across the surface are countless constructions built from the same uniform white pieces. Some are small and simple – a single tower or a wall only a few bricks high. Others are tall and intricate, rising to half a metre or more. Shapes resemble skyscrapers, bridges, domes, towers and imagined structures. Together they present a sprawling cityscape. Beneath and between the constructions lie scattered mounds of loose bricks, ready to be used for further building.
Visitors are active participants in the work. Throughout the exhibition, people sit or stand around the tables, taking handfuls of bricks and adding to the evolving city. Each new contribution becomes part of the whole, with later visitors building onto or reshaping what has been left before them. The result is a landscape that is always in flux – partly planned, partly improvised and constantly remade.
The overall effect is of a collaborative structure that grows and shifts over time. The uniform whiteness of the LEGO bricks gives the city a sculptural, architectural quality, while every addition carries the trace of individual hands.