Street artist Megx painted german bridge to look like giant LEGO Bricks

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4 years ago Pavel

While driving through the outskirts of Wuppertal in the Rhine-Rhur metropolitan region of Germany, drivers are wont to stare in disbelief the a giant multicolored cluster of Legos hovers from a bridge overhead. Although the visual effect is exactly this, in reality the bridge is (obviously) made of concrete and steel.

These Legos are actually the product of more than a century of locomotive history: the Wuppertal Northern Railway was constructed in 1879 to compete with the adjacent BME line for train passengers crossing through Wuppertal, Germany. But the BME line, built three decades earlier, had already claimed the easiest and most centrally located route, forcing the Wuppertal Northern Railway to take a complex detour through tunnels and atop viaducts. Of course, the Wuppertal Northern Railway was vastly outcompeted by the BME, and by the late 1990s the track was abandoned.

In the following years, the former railway was converted into a bike and pedestrian path, but the concrete bridges remained gray and sad if viewed from ground level.
Also the bridge on the Schwesterstraße was part of the former Wuppertal railway line, and after several years of its conversion, the city had decided to revive its design, too dull for a bridge made to be walked “slowly”.
To revitalize the bridge, the city of Wuppertal hired street artist Megx (aka Martin Heuwold), who has decided to convert it into something completely different, letting himself be inspired by the passion of his two daughters for LEGO bricks.

The artist has requested permission from the Danish company “The Lego Group” to use the design of the famous bricks, which it promptly arrived. So, Megx and a team of painters spent two weeks painting the bridge vividly, using shadows to simulate the shape of the cylindrical brick connectors, and painting a total area of about 250 square meters.
The colorful Lego-Brücke (Lego Bridge) really liked the inhabitants, and was awarded the Deutscher Fassadenpreis Advancement Prize in 2012.