ORO PublishersEditionsof Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: CopyrightPublishedinfo@oroeditions.comwww.oroeditions.comPublisherbyOROEditions©2022JohnRock 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 Author:acquirer.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 Slipcasetrees.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 1 NATURAL WOOD 5 ARTIFICIAL STONE 49 METAL 81 PAINTED WOOD 117 CARDBOARD 165 PLASTIC 183 INFORMATION SOURCES 241
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. Much has been written about the roles that the objects and practices of building 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.
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
INTRODUCTION 1
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.
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Namely, the way material, technical elements, and assembly methods are creatively integrated into a building’s design. This is embodied, for example, in Gothic cathedrals with their stone buttressing, and in Mies van der Rohe buildings with their expressed steel structures. Within the toy world, examples include American Skyline with its assembly slots disguised as vertical ornamentation, and Girder and Panel with its articulated miniaturization of actual high-rise construction. For the toys, however, the tectonic issue is complicated by the fact that each toy represents two design projects: first is the original design of the toy, and then the design of a model building using the toy. Tectonic consistency between the two, however, is ensured because the pieces and their assembly methods imbue the user’s construction with the architectural values embedded in the manufacturer’s design.
Preceding page: US Patent 499512 (see Brower’s Toy Buildings, page 118)
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John Rock, Los Angeles, 2022
Just as there are two design projects, there are two time periods from which to evaluate each building toy. The first is the time of its initial production, when the criteria for a child’s satisfaction would have been focused on ease of assembly, tactile enjoyment, ability to spark imagination, potential for new designs, and a balance between challenge and accomplishment. High marks usually translated into financial rewards for the manufacturer. The second time period is after achieving the status of antique, when some toys that might have originally received low marks due to inappropriate materials or handling difficulties might be more positively reevaluated. This is because historical distance often confers respect on anomalies and failures, and admittedly, some of these poorly conceived sets are among my favorites.
Although verisimilitude is often not the criterion, most toy parts have been modelled after at least one aspect of their real-world versions: the function, the visual appearance, or the actual material. For example, many building toys were based upon toy versions of brick construction. Some were assembled by stacking, some by friction, some by alignment rods. Some were made of rubber, some of plastic, some of wood, and some were actually brick. Despite this type of material distortion, or interpretation, I believe that building toys can be viewed through the conceptual framework of architectural “tectonics.”
Opposite: US Patent 2968118 (see American Skyline, page 212) were more complex. This immersive experience increased my awareness of the comparative features of each set, and brought me to a somewhat analytical view toward their defining characteristics. One of these is the degree of architectural realism. At one end of this spectrum are toys with simple abstract geometric shapes, like blocks, that display no specific building features or scale. Since these parts offer few visual cues, their resulting constructions only suggest buildings. Imagination is required from both the builder and the viewer to complete the composition. At the other end of the spectrum are sets whose pieces clearly depict actual architectural components and features. The impressive range of these building sets tempts one to draw parallels between architectural toys and the field of architecture itself. Their historic trajectories are somewhat in tandem, with the developments in toys trailing and reflecting those in architecture. Both buildings and building toys must represent the cultural and technological contexts of their times, and many attempt to address their ideals and aspirations as well. This is far from universal, however, and many toys, like many buildings, look backward to capture a previous historic period rather than looking forward. Architectural toys have an additional representational task, namely, the choice of how to depict real-world building materials and their resultant structures.
Toys from the period of our own childhood are cloaked in nostalgia, but toys unfamiliar to us from a much earlier time can more easily be experienced in a dual way: as embodying their original purpose within an historical context, and, at the same time, as aesthetic objects. Hopefully this book conveys a sense of both. There are many ways in which architectural construction toys could be organized. Juan Bordes has exhibited and written about his large collection using the Vitruvian qualities of Firmness, Commodity, and Delight. I have chosen, less poetically, to organize the toys in this book by their primary material, which follows a loose and overlapping chronological order from natural wood to plastic. But, primarily, the book was designed to convey the joy of actually playing with the toys.
NATURAL WOOD
Some of the earliest toys were made of natural wood, since the material was widely available and easily tooled into various shapes. These toys were often miniature versions of everyday objects. By the mid-1800s simple rectangular blocks became popular. They were easy to manufacture in most wood-working shops, and were sometimes produced as part of a broader educational strategy. These building toys were most commonly assembled by means of simple structural stacking, but some could achieve more complex arrangements by using tongue and groove joinery, pegs, or other friction connections. It is worth noting that simple natural wood blocks continue to be manufactured and sold due to their ongoing appeal to both parents and children.
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KINDERGARTEN
GIFTS 6
Starting in 1837, Friedrich Froebel outlined twenty Gifts and Occupations to be used by children in his newly invented Kindergarten. Numbers 3, 4, 5, and 6 are known as the Building Gifts, and were heavily influenced by Froebel’s time Gifts 3, 4: 23/4 x 23/4 x 23/4 in. Gifts 5, 6: 33/4 x 33/4 x 31/2 in. Natural wood Milton Bradley Co., Springfield, MA J.c.1920sR.Toy Set IDs: 71, 72, 108, 109 working with Christian Samuel Weis at the University of Berlin when Weis was creating the categorical parameters for crystallography that are still in use today. Froebel felt that the study of the geometry of crystals was a way to understand the formation of nature, one of the underpinnings of his pedagogical approach. Each of these Gifts is a cube that is cut by planes somewhat like the multiple axes of symmetry proposed by Weis, with each successive set displaying
7 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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SWIFT’S COMBINATION TOY BLOCKS 9 Size 3: 9 x 111/4 x 21/2 in. Natural McLoughlinwoodBros. Manufacturers New York, NY, 1870 J. R. Toy Set ID: 174 This set was designed by Albert B. Swift and originally called Connecting Architectural Toy Blocks because they were patented to have tin strips inserted into the slits to help connect the blocks. Swift’s own game business had declined to the point that he had this toy manufactured by McLoughlin Brothers, a publishing firm that pioneered color printing technologies for children’s books. McLoughlin advertised the grid pattern as an aid to geometrical drawing as well as a depiction of masonry joints. In 1870 what was left of Swift’s company was acquired by Elisha Selchow (later Selchow & Righter) and, along with it, Swift’s rights to the successful game Parcheesi.
CRANDALL’S IMPROVED BUILDING BLOCKS FOR CHILDREN 10Size 1: 10 x 61/4 x 31/2 in. Natural wood Charles M. Crandall, Montrose, PA, 1876 J. R. Toy Set ID: 171
The parts of this toy were based on test pieces for wooden box joints that Charles Martin Crandall was making in his shop for croquet boxes. His children enjoyed making structures with the discarded test pieces, and Crandall recognized the business potential when a client asked for some for his own family. He patented the toy in 1867 and it became quite successful. Crandall went on to produce many other toys, eventually devoting his entire facility to their manufacture.
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SCHWEIZER BAUKASTEN 91/412 x 73/4 x 2 in. Natural wood and painted glass Switzerland, c. 1910 J. R. Toy Set ID: 036
This toy is like many others from Switzerland and Germany during the early part of the twentieth century that used simple architectural block shapes, although only a few had hand-painted glass windows. The illustration on the box is unusual in that it shows a mother helping to build the toy rather than a father.
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HOLZ BAUKASTEN 15 131/2 x 10 x 21/2 in. Natural J.Germany,woodc.1910R.ToySetID:129 There is no manufacturer’s information on the box of this toy, but the finely turned mahogany pieces suggest that the set was produced by a sophisticated woodworking shop.
