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ORO Editions Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com Published by ORO Editions Copyright © 2022 John Rock and ORO Editions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying of microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Author: John Rock Editor: Lisa M. Snyder Book Design and Photography: John Rock Cover Design: Pablo Mandel / CircularStudio.com Project Manager: Jake Anderson 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition ISBN: 978-1-954081-98-7 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Inc. Printed in China. AR+D Publishing makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications. As part of this goal, AR+D, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations. Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.
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Slipcase front image: Bilt-E-Z, page 94 Slipcase rear images: La Ciudad Jardin, page 132 Architector, Jr, page 68 Der Kleine Baumeister, page 204 Cover image: Swift’s Combination Toy Blocks, page 8
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION
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NATURAL WOOD
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ARTIFICIAL STONE
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METAL
81
PAINTED WOOD
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CARDBOARD
165
PLASTIC
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INFORMATION SOURCES
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INTRODUCTION
I FELL IN LOVE with antique toys as an adult, partially because there were fewer toys in my own childhood than I would have liked. I scoured flea markets and second-hand stores for metal cars and tin gas stations as well as robots and space guns. I came to realize that all toys distort reality through a process of abstraction and simplification, partly in order to render common objects appealing to children, and partly to make them easier to manufacture. And I believe that this distortion is the basis of their appeal. Not surprisingly, being an architect, I began to focus my collecting attention on building toys. These toys are a special case. They present a box full of possibilities rather than a fully formed object. Users complete the toy by arranging pieces and assembling parts in their own way, constructing a building whose design is born of their own imagination and refined through their own manipulation. And for young children, the act of doing so can result in the acquisition of knowledge in a variety of areas, ranging from Newtonian physics to combinatorial geometry.
play had in the pedagogical agendas of early educators. And for over a century they have also formed an established parent-child activity, or perhaps more accurately, a father-son activity, since a survey of the illustrations for many of these toys reveals a gender bias. The boys build while the girls watch. Sadly, the number and variety of these toys are not widely known outside the world of collectors and museums. I am one of those collectors, and all 100-plus toys illustrated in this book are from my modest collection, numbering about twice that. By contrast, The American Building Museum in Washington, DC, has ten times that number, acquired from collector George Wetzel in 2006. The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal has a large number of sets acquired from collector Norman Brosterman in 1990. And several European institutions such as the Deutsches Museum in Munich have large collections established much earlier. Several of my favorite toys were originally part of the extensive collection assembled by the late Arlen Coffman, a friend and an inspiration for my own related pursuit.
As my collection grew, I established some categorical boundaries among different kinds of construction toys in order to guide my acquisitions. I generally collected toys for making buildings rather than toys for making mechanical structures. Therefore, with some exceptions, I chose to avoid the enormous number of toys spawned by the Britishmade Meccano and the American-made Erector. I have also chosen to focus on toys that are open-ended and intended for making multiple designs, rather than toys intended for making one specific building. Consequently, the majority of the items in my collection are considered architectural construction toys. Each of these toys is comprised of a set of parts and a set of rules. There are hard rules and soft rules. The soft rules can be broken, the hard rules cannot, such as the laws of physics and the shape and connectability of the various parts. The soft rules are conveyed by the assembly diagrams and sample building designs suggested by each set’s instructions and illustrations. Also, on a less explicit level, they include the culturally shared knowledge of basic building forms and the procedures for assembling construction toys. As evidence of this
pervasiveness, the term “building blocks” long ago entered our general lexicon as a metaphor to explain the systematic aggregation of foundational elements in a wide range of fields. Like the rules of any language, those of construction toys are generative as well as constraining. At their core are the notions of modularity and standardization. The degree to which the various parts of a toy can be substituted for each other and recombined determines the number and variety of possible building configurations. These concepts are not unique to building toys. Within the field of architecture, they fuel a dream for the mechanization of the building process, and the ability to erect real buildings with pre-manufactured components in a simplified manner similar to these toys. Recently a large block of available time afforded me the opportunity to document and photograph all of the toys in my collection. One of my goals was to construct a model building from each of the sets. Some of these buildings were conceived and constructed in a short time as illustrations of how the pieces fit together. Other buildings took much longer because the parts and the rules
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Much has been written about the roles that the objects and practices of building
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greater geometric complexity. Milton Bradley began producing the Gifts for the American kindergarten market in 1869, although the sets shown here are from the 1920s and ’30s.
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The blocks were designed by Arts and Crafts architect Arnold Mitchell, who was hired by Ernest Lott in an effort to provide a construction toy to replace those from Germany that were being boycotted during WWI. The first sets were introduced in 1918 and only had gray and white stones. In 1922 the Tudor features were added. Completed buildings were meant to match the scale of 0-gauge model trains.
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ERECTOR-BRIK Size 5: original box top glued to newer box Artificial stone, wood, cardboard, and acetate A. C. Gilbert Co., New Haven, CT, 1944 J. R. Toy Set ID: 015 Because of shortages during WWII, the company was unable to produce any metal toys, including Erector, the country’s most popular toy. They also switched most of their facilities to the production of range indicators for military anti-aircraft guns and electric motors for the trim tabs of fighter planes. To keep their toy production alive, this non-metal toy was designed by Oscar P. Ehrhardt. It was similar to other toys that used nubs on the bricks for stabilization.
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LIONEL CONSTRUCTION SET Size 333: 21 x 131/2 x 31/2 in. Aluminum, rubber, and 120v electric motor The Lionel Corp., New York, NY, 1947 J. R. Toy Set ID: 014
The company was founded in 1900 by Joshua Lionel Cowen and Harry C. Grant, and was known primarily for its electric train sets. By 1953 Lionel was one of the world’s largest toy manufacturers, and was making an annual profit of $32 million. After WWII they produced this construction toy to compete with Gilbert’s
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The set was designed by Norman H. Heftor in 1929 and included cement to glue the bricks together. This was intended to simulate the actual process of masonry construction as well as result in a stable structure that could be moved easily. Sometime after the patent was granted in 1931, the box illustration was modernized and the patent number was mentioned.
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DIETEL PLASTIC BAUKASTEN Large size: 12 x 81/2 x 1 in. Plastic Hans Dietel, Arolsen, Germany, 1947 J. R. Toy Set ID: 090
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