Compared to the amusingly terrified elf of the previous year’s Christmas promotion, the characters in 40564 Winter Elves Scene of 2022 appear at a more light-hearted moment. This review of 40564 accompanies one of its predecessor, 40484 Santa’s Front Yard of 2021. As with the twin Christmas vignettes of 2021, 40564 was paired with an indoor scene, 40565 Santa’s Workshop. In both cases the outdoor scene proved more interesting and playful than the indoor one.

The forced perspective works well, and because the mountains of 40564 don’t rise as high as the dark sky of 40484, the scene has greater intimacy, balance, and integration between the fore- and background. The string of colored lights ties together the action of the elves and the trees, which in turn help create the perspective. The lights suggest the informality of the composition compared to the more formal 40484.

I find the mountains of 40564 less verisimilar than the night sky in 40484, and they contribute to a more cartoon-like aesthetic. The white tooth bricks have been particularly well-used in the mountains, as snowy overhangs. Relative to 40484, the base of 40564 consumes more pieces, especially small ones, and is correspondingly more complex. I appreciate its icy feel, but the resulting pointillism of snow and ice verges on the incoherent.

The base incorporates a mechanism to rotate the icy pond on which one of the elves is skating, reprising and simplifying the mechanism of 40416 Ice Skating Rink of 2020 to similarly delightful effect. Like its predecessor 40484, 40564 suggests a story in which the mischievous green-hatted elf surprises the skating red-hatted elf with a snowball, but their cheery expressions tell us that it’s all in good fun, perhaps on their day off after Christmas! The adorable new squirrel piece completes the set.

40564 Winter Elves Scene draws on its predecessor’s forced perspective and interest in elves’ lives outside of the toy workshop, and adds greater opportunities for play. Five stars.

Lego kept the secret of 40516 Everyone is Awesome more successfully than most, and I at least didn’t know about it until the middle of May 2021, only a few weeks before it was released. The set’s release coincided with Pride Month, and it celebrates the LGBTQIA+ community.

Ethics. Lego’s commitments to social responsibility are well-known and include eschewing representations of contemporary weapons or warfare, and developing novel plant-based plastics to reduce carbon emissions. Compared to these commitments, Lego’s homage to the LGBTQIA+ community is exceptionally colorful and high-profile. Judging by responses from the adult Lego community, both the set and the stance it represents have been enthusiastically welcomed.

Pieces. Until opening the box of 40516 I had not fully grasped that the set is an absolute riot of color. It reminded me of a Basic set because the profusion of colors and simple bricks. As Huw has commented, many of the pieces have been re-colored and are unique to the set, making it attractive even beyond its social stance. I imagine the set must have been expensive to produce given the recolors, but the price is reasonable.

The monofigs (monochromatic minifigures) are fun and appealing, and unusual in an official context. Matthew Ashton, the designer, has chosen especially distinctive, even retro, hair pieces, which give the minifigures great character despite the absence of prints. Their lack of prints prompts me to react to 40516 as almost a piece of pop art, a medium-specific display that emphasizes the iconicity of the minifigure and colorful bricks.

Representation. 40516 effectively transmutes a set of abstract concepts and symbols—the LGBTQIA+ community, the Pride flag, gender fluidity—into the realm of the literal. The minifigures are identifiable as a community, but not specific individuals. The color coordination between the display and the minifigures emphasize that these are not merely colors on a flag, but signify people. Many of the minifigures are not clearly male or female, opening a gender-fluid space and representing the people who inhabit that space.

One of the comments on Huw’s review, by nushae, noted that Lego’s old smiley face minifigures offered a similar ambiguity, but that in the current era of highly specific, gendered minifigures Lego’s strategy has shifted. Instead of the old interpretive open-endedness, they now offer minifigure representations of different groups, for instance the much-discussed wheelchair user in 60290 Skate Park. 40516 combines both strategies, and it’s nice to see Lego recognize the continuing potential of ambiguity.

I bought 40516 on the day of its release and found constructing it unexpectedly moving as a result of its physical instantiation of the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s as laudable as a social statement as it is appealing as a collection of bricks and minifigures. Five stars.

Eric Brok’s lovely Dutch row house, 10190 Market Street, occupies an anomalous position relative to the other modular buildings and has, I believe, been consistently underappreciated. It possesses striking character and aesthetics, and its design and production were innovative for their era. The first section of this review describe the set’s inception and reception; for a discussion of the building itself, skip down a section.

Circuitous canonization

After the release of 10182 Café Corner in April 2007, Lego followed up with 10190 Market Street, released in October 2007. There appears to have been a convergence on the idea of modularity from within and without Lego. 10182 was designed by Lego’s Jamie Berard while 10190 was designed by a Dutch AFOL, the late Eric Brok. The boxes and branding of these two early modulars thus differ completely and 10190 came in a blue “Factory” box, which has subsequently been the cause of much controversy.

At the time of the release of 10190, the Factory program allowed individual customers to develop their own sets on Lego Digital Designer and then order the parts directly from Lego, complete with a customized box. 10190 may have been intended as a demonstration of the program, and to my knowledge was the only proper set released under the Factory imprimatur. Its production process, in which Lego designers worked with an AFOL to realize a set for commercial release seems prescient in 2007, and Lego launched the program that would eventually become Ideas the subsequent year, in 2008.

As further modular buildings along the lines of 10182 Café Corner were released in the years following 2007, the status of 10190 occasioned much debate: Had the set constituted part of the “official” line of modular buildings? In 2017, however, 10190 appeared in the collection of modular buildings behind Jamie Berard in the designer video for 10255 Assembly Square, settling the question in favor of including 10190 in the canon of “official” modular buildings.

Sadly, Eric Brok died in his sleep of cancer in early June 2007, shortly after 10190 was announced in May. His premature death gave the release of 10190 a degree of poignancy that October, a sense that still inheres in the building for me. I believe the minifigure who wears glasses and appears on the upper balcony of the building to be a representation of him.

Modularity of design

Ironically given its disputed status, 10190 is the most modular of any of the modular buildings. Indeed, given that the term “modular building” merely denotes buildings with floors that can be lifted off one another, one could describe 10190 as the only truly modular building. A single quote from Eric Brok appears on the back of the box and at the rear of the instructions and suggests this modularity: “I chose a square shape for the floors so the house could be rearranged in many ways.”

The three floors of the house and the roof of the market each rest on a 16x16 base and can be exchanged for one another. The staircase inside the house comes up in the center of each floor, so the floors can be rotated and still permit staircase access. The front balconies on the uppermost level of the house can be removed, and the system of tan Erling bricks on the front of the house allows the white flag and croissant sign to be repositioned on any floor. In contrast with 10182, 10190 rests on two 32x16 baseplates so that its two halves can be exchanged or even separated.

One cannot help but admire Brok’s imaginative system of modularity, but 10190’s ambitions overstepped its capabilities. Each of its modular functions work, but the results are usually aesthetically disappointing or architecturally nonsensical. Rotating the upper floors of the house results in sheer walls facing the street. Moving the dark blue ground floor of the house on top of the market works fairly well, but results in a door opening onto empty space, a lack of staircase access, and a strangely truncated light blue building next door. The house looks best arranged as it is in official images; Brok’s system, although visionary, would seem to require an architectural style more like modernism to succeed aesthetically as well as functionally.

Architecture and aging

I find 10190 to be one of the most characteristic and architecturally pleasing modular buildings. Only a few of the modular buildings evoke a sense of place: Paris in the case of 10182 Café Corner and 10243 Parisian Restaurant, and Amsterdam in the case of 10190. Its details all contribute to the effect: the decreasing size of the windows as the building rises; the 1x1 plates and tiles used as bricks above the second-floor windows; the ratio of the house’s width to height; the stone lion grotesque at the top of the façade; and the stepped, triangular climax of this façade.

The house of 10190 is one of the few modular buildings to look good from the sides and rear. Its sides include textured bricks in light gray to break up otherwise monochromatic walls, and on the back light tan bricks have been used to fill in old window openings. Moreover, the brick-built effect has improved with age. I have had the set assembled and on display continuously since 2007, and all of the light blue bricks, and the dark blue 1x2s and 1x1s, have yellowed with age on the house’s exterior. The 1x4 light blue bricks have yellowed consistently, but the 1x1 and 1x2 light blue bricks now appear in three slightly different hues, creating a gorgeous, subtle effect of variegation and age that suits the style of the house well.

Some reviewers have criticized 10190 for its lack of interior furnishings, an absence it shares with 10182 and to a lesser extent 10185 Green Grocer. Its interior is admittedly less than functional: the modular design and central staircases leave little interior space to be improved, and the door leading to the balcony on the uppermost floor opens directly onto a hole in the floor. I couldn’t care less about these problems.

10190 Market Street offers plentiful detail, architectural distinction, and boldness of design. Had it not been released in a Factory box, or had its innovative modular interchangeability been realized by subsequent sets it might be more widely recognized as the equal of its celebrated older sibling. Five stars.

The superb 31107 Space Rover Explorer must be one of the most exciting space sets in years. By LEGO’s standards, it is relatively realistic, and appears to have been inspired by NASA rovers. Mr_Cross has noted the similarity to a NASA prototype of its two-person Lunar Electrical Rover in his review, but the celebrated Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity also come to mind.

The astronaut minifigure bears a classic Space logo on his chest, but 31107’s remembrance of classic Space appears more symbolic than substantive. I would be hard-pressed to articulate any specific stylistic attributes reminiscent of classic space, except possibly the self-consciously “bricky” construction, characteristic of the Creator line as a whole. As the rare adult fan not enamored of classic Space, I don't find the minifigure particularly interesting; certainly I would have preferred a female astronaut. The upcoming 31111 includes what looks to be a robot in the same uniform.

The rover’s construction

About two thirds of the way through construction today, I realized that I was constructing a submersible with wheels, with a massive bubble window in the front, a pair of graspers, and a sealed body that tapers off towards the back. Given the bed in the rear of the rover, one could equally well describe it as a space caravan. To my mind, 31107 draws its vocabulary as much from these sources as anything extraterrestrial, with the possible exception of the undercarriage.

The six-wheel bogie suspension is similar to that used by NASA, for instance on the Mars rovers, and it functions effectively on uneven surfaces. It’s an impressive feature during play, and lends the rover much of its “Space” feel. The bogie could be more accurate to NASA’s design, and could use a higher clearance—currently the rover can’t clear even a single brick—but these changes would entail trade-offs (instability, a preponderance of Technic pieces), and I agree that the current design is likely the best available without a significantly more complex design.

Other aspects of the rover’s design are similarly impressive. The door that passes for an airlock elegantly re-purposes a bay window. The rover’s roof rack can house the little autonomous rover. There are innumerable things to position and remove—arms, a folding crane, lights, a communications array, tanks of what look to be oxygen and fuel, tools—offering many possibilities for play. Changes in design and color as one moves from back to front emphasize the different functions and areas of the rover: the chunky viewing area for exploration; the cabin-like center for habitation; the smaller, grey, industrial area for maintenance and support. These contribute to the rover’s complex character.

LEGO have prioritized accessibility of the interior, and with both the front and the rear of the rover removed one can reach every part of the cabin and play with the minifigure. Inside the cabin, I particularly like the microscope, cleverly composed of an Erling brick and a pair of binoculars.

All the other bits

31107’s other elements—the small autonomous rover, and the lime space creature—are equally outstanding, not to mention cute. The design of the small rover imitates that of the larger: they share six wheels, arms in the front, satellite dishes, and pairs of blue transparent eyes mounted above the body. I find the creature highly endearing, with its poseable tentacles and plant shoots-cum-eye stalks, and reasonably stable. By manipulating the tentacles and opening and closing the mouth a surprising degree of affects are possible. As has been noted in another review, the astronaut lacks a colleague, but I like to think that the lime creature keeps him company.

The three reviews of 31107 currently available on Brickset inadvertently indicate, I think, one of the reasons for this set’s success: it has something for everyone. Mr_Cross was drawn by the minifigure; Watsonite praises the rover but dislikes the creature; my eye was caught first by the creature, and only then did I notice the excellence of the rest of the set. Its heterogeneity is a strength. An industrial quality is balanced by playfulness; the tentacled whimsy of the creature complements the angular realism of the rover.

31107 offers a compelling main build, great functionality and play potential, and a strong measure of the capricious creativity that defines LEGO at its best, not to mention excellent value. Not classic Space, but nonetheless a classic design. Five stars.

7239 Fire Truck inaugurated the City line in 2005, and helped Lego visualize and design its post-juniorized cityscape. It proved exceptionally long-lived, and its continued availability through the end of 2011 signals its exceptional design.

Rejecting juniorization

In Brick by Brick David Robertson and Bill Breen (with whom I am not affiliated) write that in 2004 Lego executive Mads Nipper happened upon an early iteration of 7239 while seeking to reimagine what had previously been Town. The fire engine’s designer, Henrik Andersen, sought to produce a model that was both classic and current by drawing on designs from the ’80s, although 7239 perhaps most closely resembles the fire engine from 6271 of 1994.

Inspired by Andersen’s design, Nipper used the model in a forum for designers as an example of what a revitalized City ought to look like, favorably comparing it to previous fire engines, 6486 from 1997 and 4605 from 2001. Andersen’s modest engine signaled the termination of the moribund project of juniorization and marked the reconceptualization of Lego’s core offerings.

Reviving classic design

What makes 7239 reminiscent of classic Town? Although it uses a one-piece chassis, it is constructed largely of bricks and plates rather than large, highly specialized pieces. Unlike juniorized vehicles, it has a roof and a width of six studs, marking a new size standard. It resembles a real fire engine, with the large hood at the front, the blocky profile, the low clearance, and the large wheels and fenders.

7239 has the functionality of an actual fire engine, and offers a multitude of play possibilities. Fire fighters can access a box of tools stored behind the cab, extend the ladder and prop it up at multiple angles, unwind the firehose, and fold down stabilizers from either side of the engine. They can deploy a small fireboat, detach the trailer, and fill additional cupboards with equipment.

Andersen’s fire engine recognizes that builders appreciate models that represent real vehicles and buildings, and that a degree of complexity in the build contributes to the experience. Its exposed studs signal an embrace of Lego-ness that contrasts with the embarrassment of the sets of the early ’00s with their own medium. The set’s availability through 2011 attests to Andersen’s success in creating a classic style.

Well-proportioned, functional, realistic: 7239 was the strongest of the 2005 City models, and may constitute the most outstanding fire engine yet produced by Lego. Five stars.