Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings

Building shelter, constructing space and making a visible mark on the world are among the most basic of desires, and nowhere is this more apparent than in children’s play, where imitating, reimagining and reshaping the world on a manageable scale is an important learning experience. A new book, Architecture Under the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings, by Australian architectural historians Brenda and Robert Vale, takes us back through the twentieth century on a journey through the development of construction toys, considering how playing at carpet-level town planning, with some toys simulating the methods for constructing actual, human-scale buildings, may have influenced the subsequent careers and designs of well-known architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, whose High-Tech style bears a certain resemblance to engineering toy Meccano.

Architecture Under the Carpet, then, serves both as a history of construction toys and as an effective guide to trends and fashions in architecture, from the suburban development forged by the expansion of the railways to reaching for the sky with New York and Chicago-style skyscrapers (see ambitious American toy Bilt⁠-⁠E⁠-⁠Z). Buildings for which kits have been created, sometimes by ‘real life architects’ on a break from their day jobs, range from capacious German castles (wooden Richter’s Blocks) to homely log cabins (Lincoln Logs) to the air raid shelters which were developed for survival during the Second World War (scrap metal-esque toy Juneero), and even unostentatious English inter-war suburban housing (Bayko, made appropriately-enough from Bakelite, the first wholly man-made material). Others, such as Meccano, sidestepped buildings altogether, offering working models of practical necessities such cranes and bridges. The Vales contextualise all these models with details about new developments in building along with the social forces driving them. As you’d expect, a chapter about a time-consuming, cumbersome-sounding method for creating cast concrete models, manufactured by Castros (which also had the lofty aim of of building world peace through construction toys!) is accompanied by a discussion on the ideals and reality of prefabrication.

The book is readable and accessible while remaining detailed and thoroughly researched, with each chapter illuminated by colour photos of packaging and instructions, alongside photos of comparable buildings contemporary to the manufacture of the toys, which bring the aesthetics and workings of the toys to life. What’s noticeably lacking is user experience and reminiscence beyond the occasional remark that the Vales own a particular set today, or that they remember playing with it as children. The Vales allude to some of the technical challenges of building the models discussed in the book, but have missed an opportunity to bring the toys to life through interviews or first-person storytelling: some recollection of the pride felt when making a construction breakthrough after days of frustration, or putting the final brick atop a tower, could have enlivened a text backed up by archival facts and figures about places and dates of manufacture. Learning and exploring is all about having a go and getting it wrong and one of the saddest fates for a toy is to become a collector’s item, boxed up and removed from the rough-and-tumble of its original purpose. As Architecture Under the Carpet points out, many of the toys it revisits would have cost quite a sum of money when they were originally manufactured, especially to purchase extra parts to make the larger models, which makes you wonder if these construction toys were really for adults as much as children all along.

Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings

Building shelter, constructing space and making a visible mark on the world are among the most basic of desires, and nowhere is this more apparent than in children’s play, where imitating, reimagining and reshaping the world on a manageable scale is an important learning experience. A new book, Architecture Under the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings, by Australian architectural historians Brenda and Robert Vale, takes us back through the twentieth century on a journey through the development of construction toys, considering how playing at carpet-level town planning, with some toys simulating the methods for constructing actual, human-scale buildings, may have influenced the subsequent careers and designs of well-known architects such as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, whose High-Tech style bears a certain resemblance to engineering toy Meccano.

Architecture Under the Carpet, then, serves both as a history of construction toys and as an effective guide to trends and fashions in architecture, from the suburban development forged by the expansion of the railways to reaching for the sky with New York and Chicago-style skyscrapers (see ambitious American toy Bilt⁠-⁠E⁠-⁠Z). Buildings for which kits have been created, sometimes by ‘real life architects’ on a break from their day jobs, range from capacious German castles (wooden Richter’s Blocks) to homely log cabins (Lincoln Logs) to the air raid shelters which were developed for survival during the Second World War (scrap metal-esque toy Juneero), and even unostentatious English inter-war suburban housing (Bayko, made appropriately-enough from Bakelite, the first wholly man-made material). Others, such as Meccano, sidestepped buildings altogether, offering working models of practical necessities such cranes and bridges. The Vales contextualise all these models with details about new developments in building along with the social forces driving them. As you’d expect, a chapter about a time-consuming, cumbersome-sounding method for creating cast concrete models, manufactured by Castros (which also had the lofty aim of of building world peace through construction toys!) is accompanied by a discussion on the ideals and reality of prefabrication.

The book is readable and accessible while remaining detailed and thoroughly researched, with each chapter illuminated by colour photos of packaging and instructions, alongside photos of comparable buildings contemporary to the manufacture of the toys, which bring the aesthetics and workings of the toys to life. What’s noticeably lacking is user experience and reminiscence beyond the occasional remark that the Vales own a particular set today, or that they remember playing with it as children. The Vales allude to some of the technical challenges of building the models discussed in the book, but have missed an opportunity to bring the toys to life through interviews or first-person storytelling: some recollection of the pride felt when making a construction breakthrough after days of frustration, or putting the final brick atop a tower, could have enlivened a text backed up by archival facts and figures about places and dates of manufacture. Learning and exploring is all about having a go and getting it wrong and one of the saddest fates for a toy is to become a collector’s item, boxed up and removed from the rough-and-tumble of its original purpose. As Architecture Under the Carpet points out, many of the toys it revisits would have cost quite a sum of money when they were originally manufactured, especially to purchase extra parts to make the larger models, which makes you wonder if these construction toys were really for adults as much as children all along.