Lakwena gave Buzz Lightyear and Winnie the Pooh the same castle window
For Disney’s centenary, the London artist built a window tall enough for a family to stand beneath. Her own children placed the last bricks.
A window big enough to stand beside
Look first at Buzz Lightyear. A stripe of purple curls up from beside his shoulder, sweeps over his head and carries the eye towards Snow White. Higher up, Winnie the Pooh sits in another bend of colour. Each character has room to be recognised in an instant, but following the stripes sends you travelling between films. The artist who gave them this improbable shared address was London’s Lakwena Maciver.
Her piece, Kaleidowaves, stood 4.5 metres tall at its London unveiling in June 2023. The LEGO Group commissioned the castle window as part of Disney’s centenary celebrations. Where the companion LEGO Disney Castle shrank a building down to tabletop size, Maciver took a single architectural detail and made it monumental.
The last bricks belonged to two young builders
Maciver’s children, Aroko and Makelo, placed the final bricks in the mural. They were four and six at the time. Seen beside the finished window in the launch photograph, the family gives a sense of scale that even the count of 220,000 bricks struggles to convey. The children can stand beneath Buzz and still leave most of the picture towering above them.
Maciver recalled watching Disney videos repeatedly as a child in Ethiopia. Visits to an uncle near England’s Ashdown Forest later brought the landscape associated with Winnie the Pooh within reach. With her own children, The Lion King gave her a way to begin conversations about their family’s origins. That history gives the Pooh figure a particular place in the window. For this artist he also belongs to a real patch of woodland.
Three artists and four windows
The wider commission gave the same castle-window idea to artists with different memories. Amy Jones designed Through the Magical Glass, drawing on a childhood near Orlando. Kristin Texeira connected the colour of her piece, Stained Glass Memories, with the experience of hearing music and watching colour move in Fantasia. The organisers announced family building events in Paris, Manchester and New York that July.
Maciver’s coloured bands make a particularly apt invitation to collective building. Up close, one child could contribute a few pieces to a curve without being able to see where it ended. Step back to the distance of the launch photograph and the same curve holds an entire neighbourhood of characters together.
Reporting checked November 12, 2026. Plans and programs can change; follow the linked organizations for current information.