When you walk into the IWK in Halifax, a brand-new addition to the children’s hospital may catch your eye.
A very large Lego display.
It is a depiction of what the new emergency department -that is undergoing construction- will look like when finished, and it was built by local brick artist, Shawn McLeod.
In a phone interview with our newsroom, he told us he got the call two years ago and is the biggest solo project he’s ever done.
“It’s about 25,000 bricks. It took me, well, maybe 150 hours to digitally design it and then probably 250 hours to physically build it. It was a huge effort,” said McLeod.

Photo: IWK Health/Facebook
Why Lego?
Construction on the IWK has been ongoing for a couple of years.
Becky de Champlain, is the clinical lead for the redevelopment.
She tells us, they still have about 12 to 15 months of work left to go, so they wanted to have something tangible that would show the what the finished project will look like.
“When you look at something in 3D, you can actually see the scale of something and see how people, and in this case, Lego people, kind of interacting in this space,” said de Champlain. “It does give you a sense of what the final result will be.”
She said you’re able to imagine it.

Photo: IWK Health/Facebook
“You can turn on the lights. You can see people inside the building as well as outside the building. There’s so many, like small pieces of visual interest that every time I’ve looked at it lots of times since we’ve had it here, but I see something new every time.”
Positive reaction
The display is next in the pavilion area where the Tim Horton’s and Subway are.
It is five feet wide and according to McLeod, getting it to where it sits today was very stressful.
“You’re trying to carry it out of the warehouse and the doorways are only five feet in, like an inch, and then you’re trying to get it through,” said MacLeod. “You’re trying to put it on a truck, and you don’t want the whole thing to just … you know… it’s not glued together. It’s just held together with the friction of the bricks.”
Once they put it on the table, he told us there was quite a reaction.
“Children, grownups, everyone just staring at it. Construction workers stopping in their tracks going, ‘oh my gosh, we’re building that building just over there’,” explained McLeod. “It was such a positive experience to have all those eyes, all those smiles instantly as soon as we brough it out of the truck.”
And it’s been nonstop since.
Where the display will end up for good, is still up in the air.
de Champlain said it may end up in the emergency department or in the waiting area, but for now it’s in a “great location for people to kind of stop by and take a peek”.
