Brix & Blox

Brix & Blox is a workshop exploring modular building systems through making, play, and collaborative experimentation. Participants develop and produce their own sets of building blocks and use them as design tools to investigate how complex spatial structures can emerge from simple elements. By varying proportions, scale, and the relationships between individual units, the building sets provide an open framework for testing different configurations and discovering unexpected forms.

The practical work is accompanied by introductions to the history and principles of masonry, including proportions, materials, construction techniques, and structural logic. Rather than separating theoretical knowledge from design and making, the workshop brings these aspects together. Working directly with materials and physical objects allows ideas to be tested, modified, and developed through an iterative process in which hands-on experimentation becomes a way of understanding fundamental relationships between part and whole, form and structure.

The workshop is based on the idea that design knowledge can emerge through making and that play provides a productive method for experimentation and collective learning. Individual building sets become both design instruments and means of exchange: they can be combined, compared, and collectively transformed into larger structures. Brix & Blox was developed by Hinnerk Utermann and visual artist Arryn Snowball, drawing on their collaborative work with building sets in exhibitions, workshops, and performative settings.

The workshop was held as a Summer School at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in summer 2023.