Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys by Tamar Zinguer (review)

Tamar Zinguer’s elegantly produced book on building toys and architecture is a long-awaited addition to a growing academic literature on playthings, their design histories, and social implications. Zinguer’s book joins a series of exhibitions and catalogs produced by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (1990s); cultural and consumer histories, such as Gary Cross’s Kids’ Stuff (1997); and architectural histories of building toys, such as Robert and Brenda Vale’s Architecture on the Carpet (2013). While she stays within those established conventions, she also explores the tantalizing implications not only of the large-scale potential for miniaturized construction, but also of failure and destruction as a creative force.

In four case studies ranging from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, Zinguer examines Friedrich Froebel’s Kindergarten Gifts, Richter’s Anchor blocks, the Erector and Meccano sets, and Charles and Ray Eames’s House of Cards. These span not only an important period of time for the mass production and consumption of toys in Europe and the United States, but also an intriguing variety of materials and building forms: wooden blocks, pressed quartz “stones,” metallic trusses and bolts, and cardboard planes. The examples she describes are all familiar to historians of architecture and design; the Erector and Meccano sets are probably the most well known to non-specialists.

Zinguer’s narrative ties building toys to nascent values of modernism in the study of geometric forms, systems of building and engineering, and prefabrication. Her claim to uncover modernist “intentions” (13–14) in building toys is not particularly original, but what Zinguer goes on to do is much more substantial and nuanced. Her chapter on Froebel’s Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations (c. 1836) concerns the manipulation of blocks in relation to Froebel’s training in mineralogy, which she argues is bound to a German Romantic notion of the unity of life, and the animation of the child’s consciousness through the manipulation of nature’s own geometric form. The Anchor Stone Building Blocks (c. 1877), which were invented by brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal and then sold to Friedrich Richter, who exploited the patent, were sets of colorful, detailed architectural forms from precisely manufactured pressed quartz, sand, chalk, and linseed oil. This toy likewise shows how geometry, tectonics, and science were bound to the block. Beyond teaching a history of style or reaf-firming historicism for children, Zinguer claims that the building system that these blocks embody is evident in the daring experimentalism of the Lilienthal brothers’ later endeavors around human flight. She suggests that their play elaborated the kit’s prescribed lessons, raising the importance of the unpredictability of play itself.

Her third chapter on Meccano and Erector sets (c. 1900), a kit of interchangeable parts, trusses, and girders, explores how experimentation was less a heroic exercise in character building and mechanical success than fraught with failure as engineers and bridge builders at the turn of the century knew all too well. The final chapter on the House of Cards by Charles and Ray Eames returns again to the implications free-ranging play might have had for a history of prefabricated dwellings, experimental media, and modern design. Although Zinguer is invested in a modernist genealogy, and she refers to designers as “pioneers” more than once, she disrupts any neat teleology by lingering on projects that had halting or limited success.

If Zinguer claims at the outset to investigate intent, then she steps sensibly around questions of direct influence between toys and built form. This is where the subtitle “intimations of modernism” enters. It is only in the conclusion that these adjacencies are theorized and argued, and while late, that section is enlightening and worthwhile. Zinguer insists upon the potential of play and free association and on the “haptic” as a source of knowledge. This claim would benefit from a more detailed description of the toys’ material qualities—the small size of the cubes...