pdf 1 - exhibitions international

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 international. 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