The humble building block. Maybe it’s not so humble after all.
The way we use the words tells us so. Chromosomes, it is said, are the building blocks of the human body; atoms, the building blocks of the universe. Building blocks themselves help lay the foundation of a child’s character. No less an authority than Dr. Benjamin Spock says so.
“When we see children building with blocks. . ., we’re apt to think, in our mixed-up, adult way, that these are just amusements, quite different from serious occupations such as doing lessons and holding a job,” he writes in his child-rearing classic, “Baby and Child Care.” In fact, “the small child pushing a block along a crack on the floor, pretending it’s a car, (is) hard at work learning about the world.”
In this season of giving, as anyone with Lincoln Logs or Legos in the toy chest knows, the building block often is the gift of choice. But what explains its enduring appeal? What lessons do building blocks and other architectural toys teach? And how do seemingly simple toys reflect changes in the complex art of architecture?
Some intriguing answers emerge in “Toys and the Modernist Tradition,” which opened Wednesday at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The show’s catalog is particularly insightful as it charts the impact modern architecture has had on toy manufacturers. Visions of glass towers spawned glass building blocks. Utopian modernism inspired a miniature factory city. The contextual architecture of recent years has produced toys that invite children to envision ensembles of buildings, even entire cities-not just isolated, toy-like skyscrapers.
“It’s a basic human instinct to build things and use whatever’s around, whether it’s wooden blocks or tin cans,” the exhibition’s curator, Howard Shubert, said in a telephone interview. “The fact that these toys don’t break also is quite important. That way, they can be passed down from generation to generation.”
Babies typically begin playing with blocks at about 5 months old, according to child development experts. By clacking two wooden blocks together, babies not only learn how to handle objects, but to sense cause-and-effect relationships. Making blocks go “bam-bam” creates a joyful noise.
“Manipulating blocks is a valuable play and learning exercise for baby,” Dr. William and Martha Sears write in “The Baby Book,” a baby care guide that covers the period from birth to age 2. The 5-month-old “has complete control of this toy, and it helps encourage thumb-and-forefinger grasping that will develop over the next few months.” In some cases, over the course of a lifetime, the development turns out to be extraordinary.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother gave her young son a set of small wooden blocks designed by the 19th Century educator Frederich Froebel to teach children about geometric shapes. In a Wright biography published last year, author Meryle Secrest makes much of the influence of these blocks on Wright’s career. So do the purveyors of architectural toys, such as a wood-block version of Wright’s earth-hugging Robie House.
“Mr. Wright acknowledged that his exposure to these blocks played a role in the development of his architectural thinking,” the Bower Studios Corp. of Vergennes, Vt., states in a leaflet about the toy. In Wright’s case, the seed did not fall far from the prairie flower. His son, John, developed the perennial favorite Lincoln Logs, with their interlocking brown pieces of wood, after watching his father use similar technology in 1916 during construction of Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
The Montreal exhibition, which features about 25 examples from the architecture center’s collection of more than 300 architectural toys and games, opens with material created in the same decade as Lincoln Logs. Yet its toys look forward, not backward.
Among the oldest in the group are 62 colored cast-glass blocks made in 1919 and known as “Dandanah, The Fairy Palace.” Produced in Germany, the jewel-like blocks reflect the fantastic utopian visions of architect Bruno Taut, who believed that glass-transparent and suggestive of openness-could be an agent of social change. Ultimately, of course, it took postwar American capitalism to make the steel-and-glass skyscraper dream come true and no social revolution accompanied the International Style high-rises of architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Mies and the early modernists believed fervently in the need to invent a new architecture for a new age of technology. They sought to reduce architecture to its essence, stripped of bric-a-brac Victorian decoration. Toys were no exception.
In 1923, the Weimar Bauhaus produced “Bauspiel,” literally “building play.” Its abstract geometric blocks are machine-cut pieces of wood painted in the primary colors of red, yellow and blue, plus green. In contrast to traditional toys, in which the parts must be put together in a single way, the Bauspiel blocks could be assembled in whatever fashion a child saw fit. In that sense, they prefigure the brightly colored Lego bricks that come from the town of Billund, Denmark. Someone once calculated that six eight-studded Lego bricks could be joined in 102,981,500 different ways.
“The most significant aspect of modern toys is their extraordinary flexibility,” Shubert writes in the show’s catalog. “They allow children maximum freedom to explore ideal designs based on their own creative instincts, unfettered by preordained outcomes or established rules.”
Traditional toys commonly depicted the non-work world-schools, churches, houses. When modernist toys represented actual buildings, they shattered this convention, too, representing the world of work in the world of play.
Its smokestacks, long factory blocks, and worker housing high-rises endow Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann’s “Fabrik” of 1920 with the Zeitgeist of the machine age. Ironically, this idealized factory town, a symbol of modern mass production, was made traditionally, of hand-painted wood. It is a toy, Shubert observes, “with one foot in the past, the other in the present.”
Mass-produced modernist toys later emerged in the work of American architect Charles Eames, who designed stiff cardboard shapes that could be assembled into three-dimensional objects in an almost infinite variety of ways. Even the generic name of Eames’ “The Little Toy” of 1952 underscores the architect’s love of mass-produced, off-the-shelf parts, which turned up in a case-study house he and his wife Ray designed for Arts & Architecture, the Southern California architecture and design magazine.
Is the house an oversized version of the toy or is the toy an undersized version of the house? An architecture critic often feels compelled to ask the same question about skyscrapers that resemble small objects blown up to massive scale-and get nicknames to match.
The sliced-off diagonal tops of Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s Pennzoil Place in Houston earned that pair of towers the sobriquet “the milk cartons” when they were constructed in 1974. A slender, curving office tower in Manhattan, also by Johnson-Burgee, was dubbed “the lipstick building” upon its completion in 1986.
Each of these skyscrapers is best experienced from afar. At ground level, they are absolutely forbidding. Perhaps real buildings can serve as models for toys. But the reverse is not true if we are to have cities that engage us at street level as well as on the skyline.
Recent toys seem to acknowledge that architecture is an art of creating urban ensembles instead of isolated objects. “Skyline,” a 1990 toy by Horst Dwinger of Germany, gives children a chance to arrange a canyon of skyscrapers as well as a skyline silhouette. It even comes complete with a miniature Christmas tree, a reminder of the tree that graces the greatest grouping of skyscrapers-the one at New York’s Rockefeller Center-at this time of year.
The 1988 Austrian toy “Capital Game” takes the art of city-building to the nth degree. There are wood blocks representing skyscrapers, bridges, apartment houses; tinted blue acrylic squares that symbolize water; even a compass in case the child wants to follow plans for actual cities that are included in the toy’s instructions. Shubert believes that the toy works best when children don’t follow particular plans, instead having the freedom to create their own ideal cities.
Perhaps. But it was wiping the slate clean and disregarding the conventions of human-scaled cities that helped produce everything from high-rise public housing projects to sterile downtown plazas. Before they creatively reinterpret the metropolis, tomorrow’s architects and urban planners should learn what made cities work in the first place.
Those lessons are the building blocks of the good life for all.
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“Toys and the Modernist Tradition” appears through May 1. Galleries at the Canadian Centre are closed from Jan. 10 to Feb. 2.
