pdf 1 - exhibitions international

finished building to be picked up. Their designs, however, look much more
‘architect designed’ than the American ones.
The lack of lintels implies that the Elgo plastic bricks, (like Lego, of which
more later) interlocked sufficiently to hold together without lintels over the
openings. Another interpretation is that you were not expected to build widespan
openings, thereby dismissing one of Le Corbusier’s desired Five Points of
Architecture, la fenêtre en longueur (the long horizontal window). 15
Apart from the interlocking, another aspect of American Bricks is that they
were designed for building cities. Indeed Halsam and Elgo made all the components
of a city and its hinterland. There were American Logs out in the sticks,
American Bricks (either wooden or plastic) in the suburbs, and American Skyline,
an Elgo set for making skyscrapers, 16 in the Central Business District. As Halsam’s
leaflet says, ‘Many families buy set after set of…Bricks – permanent models are
built at small expense – eventually complete…modern cities result.’ The idea of
building a city is of course a great way to sell more bricks, and thinking about
sales success will bring us to Lego.
But before Lego there was Hilary Page, a British toy designer who founded
a company called Kiddicraft in 1932, using his savings of £100. 17 He researched
and wrote on child development, and was interested in using plastics to make
toys because he was concerned about small children chewing the paint off
wooden toys; 18 he introduced his ‘Sensible Toys’, made of plastics, in 1937. 19 Page
marketed his new Kiddicraft Self-locking Building Bricks after the Second
World War, when plastics became more widespread. He applied for a patent for
these in 1944 and it was granted in 1947, 20 following an earlier patent for square
bricks. The Self-locking Bricks were rectangular (brick shaped, in fact) with
eight circular studs on the top, and look very like Lego. They were not a great
success for Kiddicraft, or at least not a major part of their sales, and the company
suffered further problems that may have been part of the reason for Page’s
suicide in 1957. 21
In Billund, Denmark, in the 1930s the carpenter and joiner Ole Kirk
Christensen began making wooden toys, because the Depression had hit the
building trade. Christiansen’s quality toys were a success, and in 1934 he named
his company Lego, a contraction of the Danish words ‘Leg Godt’, or ‘play well’,
and, for Classical scholars, to take out, pick out, extract, remove (among other meanings)
in Latin. 22 Certainly there is a lot of picking out and extracting involved in
playing with Lego, accompanied by the distinctive sound of raking through the
pieces like a cat in a litter tray. In 1947 Christiansen, who, like Page, saw that his
future lay in plastics, bought an injection-moulding machine from a firm in
London, and received with it, presumably to show what it could do, a sample of
the Kiddicraft Self-locking bricks. 23 Lego soon made use of their new machine
and came out with a copy of Page’s bricks, called Automatic Binding Bricks, 24 but
with some changes, as detailed in a court case that Lego later brought against a
firm they accused of copying their design. 25
Various firms subsequently made plastic bricks that were very like Lego,
including Airfix, who are better known for their plastic model kits. The 1960s
Airfix Betta Bilda26 is definitely much harder to assemble than Lego27 and it
was initially designed only for making buildings, but it is one of the few
building toys that makes a ‘proper’ roof, out of separate tiles. Like Wenebrik
roofs, the Betta Bilda ones, which are green, are very hard to put together or
to take apart.
Lego took the pirating of their bricks very seriously and back in 1987 were
described as one of the most actively litigious companies in terms of intellectual
property. 28 However, the result of their court case in 198829 has meant that copies
of Lego bricks are no longer illegal, and there are now a number of versions that
do the same sort of thing and that fit with genuine Lego, such as the Chinese
‘Enlighten Brick’. However, Lego is still the authentic original product. The final
part of Lego’s current success was the 1958 redesign of the brick to incorporate
tubes on the underside that improved its ability to stay connected (called ‘clutch
power’ by Lego), with the result that all Lego bricks made since 1958 will still fit
together with the company’s most modern products. Over fifty years of production
is an impressive record, rivalled only by Richter’s Blocks and Meccano. The
revised system for connecting Lego bricks also made it possible to manufacture
sloping bricks, 30 which meant that one’s toy houses needed no longer either to
have flat roofs or look like ziggurats.
Even before the revised brick design, Lego were busy thinking about urban
schemes, and in a key decision the bricks, which had become Lego Mursten (Lego
Bricks) in 1953, became in 1955 the Lego Mursten System i Leg (Lego Bricks System
of Play). 31 Here Lego did for toy bricks what Märklin had done in the nineteenth
century for toy trains: they made a system. Halsam had suggested building a city
by using lots of American Bricks, implying that a city is formed when two or
three houses come together. Lego, on the other hand, applied the principles of
municipal planning and made not just houses but a whole scheme capable of
180 Lego and the Green City Lego and the Green City 181