How the POMO Museum is using building blocks for (creative) thoughts

If you’ve ever wanted to see what a mini Rocky Point looks like, you can visit the POMO Museum until October to find out. Photo via Port Moody Heritage Society

A few steps from the front door of the museum, a room is filled with dozens of miniature worlds.

The POMO Museum, a chestnut-brown and beige building originally built in 1908, once served as the second railway station in Port Moody.

Now, more than one century later, the building is sparking creativity through building blocks for people young and old.

On July 30, the POMO Museum opened a new exhibit, Construction Toys: Creativity Unleashed, that features Rocky Point Park and the surrounding neighbourhood — breweries, the pool and park — in toy building blocks.

The display was made in collaboration with Vancouver’s Community for Adult Fans of LEGO, an organization that has partnered with the museum on other building block-based exhibits for roughly one decade, says Farmer Chomitz, the museum’s director.

This summer, the museum decided to accompany the exhibit with a $5 build-your-own kit, which has attracted building block fans of all ages.

And, the museum hopes, new fans of the city’s history.

“The day the build open, a young man and his grandfather came in — inspired by the Rocky Point Park display — he built a lifeguard hut,” said Chomitz, adding that as many as 10 people came into the museum earlier this week in search of a building block kit.

“We have, what I’m pretty sure is, a garden on an alien planet. A bunch of vehicles, a rescue boat dock, haunted house.”

As part of the Rocky Point display, the Vancouver Community for Adult Fans of LEGO built a replica of the POMO Museum and other Rocky Point staples. Photo via Port Moody Heritage Society

The interactive exhibit comes as museums, institutions long known for aging artifacts and in-person tours, incorporate new forms of technology such as augmented reality to educate and inspire the next generation of museumgoers.

Museums often fall under two categories: interactive places such as Science World, where games and other tools allow people to learn through touch, or art gallery-style buildings where information is consumed through reading and your own interpretation.

The POMO Museum tries to serve as a happy medium between those genres, Chomitz said.

The Construction Toys exhibit adds a tactile element to the museum’s posters and artifacts — which chronicles the start of the IOCO Townsite among other Port Moody-specific history — and may help people retain more information.

“We want to be able to engage people and help them remember things,” Chomitz said. “It’s not as dry, it’s LEGO at the end of the day. LEGO is fun.”

The Rocky Point building block exhibit also includes a small display about the history of building blocks and construction toys — specifically, how those kind of tools helps children learn.

Building blocks have long been associated with learning and spatial awareness, Chomitz said, adding that the oldest forms of building blocks were pieces of tin or scrap laying around the house.

However, modern day building blocks such as LEGO, have the capacity to inspire children (or adults) to play and longevity to serve as month-long museum exhibits.

“Because they click together, you can have really dynamic shapes. Whereas wooden blocks — although there is the bridge shape and the triangle shape — they’re going to fall over,” Chomitz said.

“If you and I wanted to buy a fancy Millennium Falcon, we could build it and it would stay there until we unbuilt it. It has that sort of staying power.”

“It has that sort of staying power,” said Farmer Chomitz, director of the POMO Museum, of building blocks. Photo via Port Moody Heritage Society

The current exhibit doesn’t feature any Tri-Cities-specific history lessons. But the POMO Museum is hoping to grow the building block concept to educate residents about local architecture and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) projects.

Last month, when the exhibit launched, demand from the public outpaced the museum’s supply of building blocks, Chomitz said. And the museum feared they would have to tear down resident’s build-your-own projects every week.

Within the first couple weeks of the exhibit, however, the museum received a donation of building blocks that has allowed them to fill the exhibit room with multiple toy creations.

“Our goal is to fill the room,” Chomitz said before the exhibit closes on Oct. 26.

As the building block-based worlds start stacking up in a corner of the museum, Chomitz is not ruling out the possibility of using their new supply of blocks to replicate other Port Moody sites — or invite residents to build one of the city’s many heritage buildings, such as the Royal Bank.

“We are hoping to use our bricks to inspire creativity,” Chomitz said. “And teach people things about their world.”