Toys to Inspire Budding Architects and Designers
Frank Lloyd Wright’s blocks, cards by Eames and more toys from around the globe tap into kids’ imaginations and build skills
A present from his mother laid the foundation for 9-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright’s lifelong interest in architecture. “I … played with the cube, the sphere and the triangle,” he wrote about the blocks — originated by Friedrich Froebel, the father of kindergarten — that his mother had picked up at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, the first World’s Fair in the United States. “I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I learned to see this way, and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals of nature. I wanted to design.”
This holiday season, you too can help launch a child’s love of design with these 12 architecture-inspired toys from around the world, from replicas of Wright’s blocks to the latest construction kits and dollhouses.
This holiday season, you too can help launch a child’s love of design with these 12 architecture-inspired toys from around the world, from replicas of Wright’s blocks to the latest construction kits and dollhouses.
The influence of Wright’s beloved blocks is apparent in the simple geometry of the Winslow House (1893) in River Forest, Illinois, his first major commission as an independent architect. He considered the symmetrical home beneath a sloping roof with wide eaves his original Prairie house.
Photo from Pamela Tilton
Photo from Pamela Tilton
2. Unit blocks. Froebel blocks are small and intended for use by children ages 3 and up. Unit blocks, developed by U.S. educator Caroline Pratt in 1913, are based on the same mathematical principles, but are larger and appropriate even for 1-year-olds. All shapes in the set are sized in relation to the rectangular brick, or unit. Many companies make unit blocks; sets from Community Playthings are fashioned in New York and Pennsylvania of maple certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Photo from Community Playthings
Photo from Community Playthings
Lincoln Logs 100th Anniversary Tin - 00854
His toy came to be known as Lincoln Logs. Just ahead of the 2016 centennial, K’nex this year returned production to the United States and issued a 111-piece 100th-anniversary tin.
4. Bauhaus Bauspiel. The cubic Haus am Horn was part of the first exhibition, in 1923, of the Bauhaus, the influential modernist art school founded by German architect Walter Gropius. The Bauhaus sought to bring together art and craft and to merge design with industry.
Photo by John Levett
Photo by John Levett
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher was a student of Bauhaus artists Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Siedhoff-Buscher designed this colorful 22-piece maple set for “building play” as part of her furniture and toy collection for the Haus am Horn’s nursery. A replica is available from Swiss toy company Naef.
Photo from Naef
Photo from Naef
5. House of Cards. Operating under the tenet of “serious fun,” husband-wife team Charles and Ray Eames designed buildings, furniture, movie sets, magazine covers, leg splints for World War II soldiers — and toys. Their House of Cards decks, first made in the early 1950s, contain 54 small, 32 medium or 20 giant cards bearing images from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms — “the good stuff,” as the Eameses described it. Six slots on each card enable them to be combined in myriad imaginative structures.
Computer House of Cards, created as souvenirs for guests of the IBM pavilion at the 1970 world’s fair in Osaka, Japan, today is a sought-after collectible.
Computer House of Cards, created as souvenirs for guests of the IBM pavilion at the 1970 world’s fair in Osaka, Japan, today is a sought-after collectible.
6. Archiville. Why stop at a slotted house when you can have a whole city? Luca Boscardin, a former architecture student from Italy who’s now designing fanciful toys in Amsterdam, came up with this take on the Eameses’ idea. Archiville is distributed by Studio Roof, an Amsterdam company that creates toys, objects and home furnishings.
Photo from Studio Roof
Photo from Studio Roof
7. Alexander Girard memory game. The Eameses recruited architect-designer Alexander Girard to head the textile division of the furniture-manufacturing firm of Herman Miller. Girard became known for his playful, folk-art-inspired motifs, seen here in the living room of Eero Saarinen’s Miller House, commissioned in 1953 by J. Irwin and Xenia Simons Miller in Columbus, Indiana.
Photo from the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Photo from the Indianapolis Museum of Art
His vibrant designs readily lend themselves to children’s toys, such as Gloria Fowler’s 36-pair memory game for Ammo Books, a U.S. publisher of materials on the visual arts and pop culture.
Ammo makes other Girard-based toys, including blocks; a coloring book; and this 24-piece, 2-by-3-foot puzzle featuring his Eden print (1962).
Photos left and below from Ammo Books
Ammo makes other Girard-based toys, including blocks; a coloring book; and this 24-piece, 2-by-3-foot puzzle featuring his Eden print (1962).
Photos left and below from Ammo Books
8. Lego Architecture Series. “Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow” is the mission of Lego, and the toy company certainly succeeded in that goal with Adam Reed Tucker. Introduced to Lego as a preschooler, Tucker grew up to become an architect in Chicago, then parlayed his hobby of reimagining iconic buildings in plastic bricks into the Lego Architecture series. Today, he’s one of 13 Lego Certified Professionals, freelance brick artists recognized by the Danish company as trusted business partners. This year, the Flatiron Building, above, Lincoln Memorial and Louvre joined the series.
The new year also will bring an updated model, below, of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, which, at 2,716.5 feet (about 828 meters), is the world’s tallest building.
For those who would rather come up with their own modernist designs, the series’ Studio kit contains 1,210 pieces that are all white — the better, the thinking goes, to explore the core architectural concepts outlined in the accompanying 272-page booklet. Six leading firms, including SOM and Sou Fujimoto, use actual case studies to discuss such principles as space and section and modules and repetition.
Two photos above from The Lego Group
What Could You Imagine With Lego’s New Architecture Kit?
Two photos above from The Lego Group
What Could You Imagine With Lego’s New Architecture Kit?
9. The Lego Architect. Lifelong Lego fan Tom Alphin surveys the history of architecture through photos of real buildings and their amazing renditions by Lego artists worldwide in The Lego Architect, published in September by No Starch Press. The hands-on hardback covers seven styles (neoclassicism, Prairie, Art Deco, modernism, Brutalism, postmodernism and high-tech) and gives instructions for 12 small models based on the key elements of each. Many of the models can be built with the bricks in Lego Architecture Studio, but Alphin also provides a complete brick list if you’d rather cobble together your own set.
Photo from No Starch Press
Photo from No Starch Press
10. Arckit. The latest in snap-together plastic model-building tools, Arckit was invented by Irish architect Damien Murtagh to help him explain three-dimensional computer models to his clients without having to resort to cardboard and glue. Now it’s quickly becoming a popular educational toy. Easy to use and extremely versatile, the 1:48-scale modular components come in three sets: 60, 120 and 240; the numbers reflect the minimum square meters possible to scale-build with each kit.
Although Arckit includes a sample to get users started, it eschews step-by-step building instructions in favor of a handbook that describes each component and its function. A digital library of surface textures provided by building-material companies can be printed on the included adhesive paper, allowing designers to add removable details like wood flooring and stone walls. Named best startup in the 2014 London Design Awards, Arckit this year won a Red Dot award for product design, New York Maker Faire awards and a Parents’ Choice gold award.
In 2016, Arckit will launch Arckit Infiniti 3D, a store with 3-D-printed components, and Murtagh says he hopes users will tell him what they’d like to see in the store.
Photo from Arckit
Although Arckit includes a sample to get users started, it eschews step-by-step building instructions in favor of a handbook that describes each component and its function. A digital library of surface textures provided by building-material companies can be printed on the included adhesive paper, allowing designers to add removable details like wood flooring and stone walls. Named best startup in the 2014 London Design Awards, Arckit this year won a Red Dot award for product design, New York Maker Faire awards and a Parents’ Choice gold award.
In 2016, Arckit will launch Arckit Infiniti 3D, a store with 3-D-printed components, and Murtagh says he hopes users will tell him what they’d like to see in the store.
Photo from Arckit
11. Modular house and furniture. Children who don’t yet have the dexterity or patience to build intricate architectural models can still exercise their imaginations with the minimalist dollhouse by Mini Archi, a Belgian brand created by architect-designer parents. The house is made in Portugal and composed of three nesting boxes plus accessory pieces in white-lacquered or natural birch.
12. Dollhouse chair. Where space is tight and multifunction appreciated, consider this birch plywood chair by Tokyo’s Torafu Architects. Its diagonal red arms open to form the dormers of a three-story dollhouse. Shut the house when playtime’s over, and the dolls and their belongings (not included) remain safely ensconced and out of the way.
Photo from Torafu Architects (Koichi Suzuno, Alicja Strzyżyńska)
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Photo from Torafu Architects (Koichi Suzuno, Alicja Strzyżyńska)
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Photo from Froebel USA