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contents introduction Toys Are Us 7 chapter one Modernism on the Line 9 chapter two Richter’s Blocks and the Castles on the Rhine 24 chapter three Meccano and Making Visible How Things Work 38 chapter four Lott’s Bricks and the Arts and Crafts Movement 51 chapter five Wenebrik and the (Un-modern) Steel House 64 chapter six Lincoln Logs and the Log Cabin 77 chapter seven Mobaco and De Stijl 89 chapter eight Bayko and Suburbia 99 chapter nine Minibrix and Unassuming Architecture 111 chapter ten Juneero and the Architecture of Make-Do-and-Mend 127 chapter eleven Castos and Concrete on the Carpet 136 chapter twelve Bilt-E-Z, Girder and Panel, Arkitex and the Brave New World 150 chapter thirteen Playplax and Deconstruction 164 chapter fourteen Lego and the Green City 176 chapter fifteen Learning Architecture on the Carpet 189 Notes 191 Picture Credits 204 Acknowledgments 204 Index 205 This sales blad contains uncorrected proofs of sample pages. The full specification for the book itself is: Trimmed page size: 22.9 x 15.2 cm hardback with jacket 208 pages with 111 illustrations, 97 in colour ISBN 978-0-500-34285-5 £19.95 (price subject to change without notice) Thames & Hudson 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX www.thamesandhudson.com
introduction Toys Are Us If, according to WordsWorth, ‘the child is father of the man’ 1 does the construction toy therefore make the architect? If you played with Meccano (British but with many copies all over the world) do your buildings have a prefabricated engineered appearance with lots of holes in bits of the structure? If you played with Girder and Panel (American but with a British copy) are your buildings typical of so much commercial architecture, high-rise blocks with frames clad with panels of glass and sometimes solid material? In the middle of the nineteenth century a group of architects emphasized the importance of the learning environment to a child’s development, stating that what was experienced then would be ‘carried to the end of life’. 2 Designers of educational toys from Friedrich Froebel with his famous blocks3 to Hilary Page, an early user of plastic for toys and a man who could have claimed to have invented Lego, 4 have also built reputations on the idea that their toys would form the mind of the child in the best possible way. This book tries to look for similarities between what you can build with a selection of construction toys and the architecture that these seem to represent best, as well as being an excuse to have a lot of fun playing with them. The toy industry is <strong>international</strong>. Just as modern architecture spread from the beginning of the twentieth century to become almost an instrument of globalization, so toys could also claim to be a unifying factor in the spread of ideas. Germany started the trend with the successful Richter’s Blocks, but American Lincoln Logs and their many imitators have also ensured children around the world can build log cabins on the carpet, and even good old British Meccano was made under licence as far away as Argentina. While it is of course not quite true that the whole course of modern architecture was set by the construction toys of the modern period, as early as the 1920s Bilt-E-Z, an American metal toy, could be used to construct the iconic stepped-back skyscraper, 5 just like the 1931 McGraw Hill and Empire State buildings in New York. Later, the British Arkitex mirrored the steel-framed glass towers and office blocks of the modern era. Not all construction toys looked forward to (or even sideways at) change in the built environment. Richter’s Blocks never really progressed beyond building a mythical image of medieval Germany, in America Lincoln Logs perpetuated the legend of the frontier and Wild West in its many versions of miniature log cabins, and in Britain black-and-white Tudor Minibrix were sold with a grainy photograph of seventeenth-century houses in the village of Weobley in Herefordshire, so redolent of ‘olde England’. The toys featured in this book are only a few examples of the very many different building toys that have been sold in the last hundred or so years. There are families among these toys, such as those that stack, like Richter’s Blocks, those with interlocking bricks, like modern Lego, and those with systems that bear no resemblance to how buildings are really put together, like Bayko. We have tried to pick examples of different types of construction systems, as well as toys that seem, at least to us, to have a relationship with architecture. Some excellent ones never made these pages: the 1930s French toy Assemblo made Bilt-E-Z-like stepped-back towers from metal plates that were joined by threading rods through their intersecting edges; the 1940–50 DuPage Vinylite Plastic Building Sets from Chicago made very good small, modern, flat-roofed houses that seem to have stepped straight from the pages of contemporary issues of Architectural Forum (although this was probably because the smaller sets did not come with the more expensive pitched roofs); for real Art Deco fantasies it is hard to beat the 1930s British printed-paper construction toy Samlo; and in wonderful miniature there was the 1960s Merit Toddlers Towers [sic], which stacked up to make tiny tower blocks. We hope you may be inspired to track these down and have a go with them and with the ones we feature. The great thing about architecture on the carpet is that it is so easy to have another try if your building turns out a total mess. 6 Toys Are Us 7
Page 1: arChiTeCTure on The CarpeT The Curi
Page 5 and 6: An early interlocking Lego-style to
Page 7 and 8: An early version of classic Lego: 1
Page 9 and 10: The Lego green city has low-carbon
Page 11: Brenda and roBert Vale arChiTeCTure

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