Olafur Eliasson Wants You to Create a Lego Utopia on the High Line

Olafur Eliasson.
Photo: Cait Munro

If you can’t imagine a better way to spend a spring afternoon than playing with Legos on the High Line, you’re in luck—Olafur Eliasson’s new interactive installation is sure to unleash the inner child in everyone.

But The Collectivity Project is about more than just play. Eliasson conceived of the project as a way to bring people together and allow them to create a utopian society, if only in miniature form. The idea, which is up until September 30, is at home at the 10th Avenue and West 30th Street section of the High Line, where the sounds of construction buzz in the background.

To kick the project off, High Line Art invited 10 of the city’s most prominent architecture firms, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Bjarke Ingels Group, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, and SHoP Architects to contribute structures to the model city, which include everything from intricate skyscrapers to a tiny, delicate tree.

Eliasson is known for public installations that combine art, architecture, science, and research. The Collectivity Project was first realized in 2005 in Albania and Norway, and the High Line installation marks its first visit to North America. “I think in Europe, in the past decade or so, we have come to the conclusion that you can really only investigate or evaluate the individual if you stand on the platform of the collectivity,” Eliasson told SFGate in 2007. “It simply doesn’t make sense to talk about individuality if you don’t have a sense of collectivity.”