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

Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern BuildingsBrenda Vale and Robert ValeLondon: Thames & Hudson, 2013. Notes, images, acknowledgements, index. 208 pp. $27.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780500342855Professors of architecture and experts in sustainable design, Brenda Vale and Robert Vale place new foundations in the field of twentieth-century toys with their most recent book Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings. The authors take a nuanced approach that leads to few outright conclusions about the subject but rather to more questions about whether architecture inspires the toy or vice versa, about how toys inform child development, and about the extent to which consumer society influences toy design.Ranging from Richter's stone blocks (actually, a composite of chalk, sand, and linseed oil) to plastic LEGOs (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), the authors capture a broad spectrum of the types of construction and materials common to these toys. Through this survey, they make some innovative observations: Lincoln Logs "mimicked how such buildings are fundamentally constructed" (p. 80); "the Dutch [Mobaco] is an elegant system that makes models only superficially similar to buildings children would see, whereas the English [Bayko] is a complex and rather pragmatic system that makes quite accurate replicas of very familiar buildings" (p. 92); and Castos were a "model of the process of making concrete" (p. 144). Thus, toy design has to balance accuracy with assembly.Throughout the book, the authors supply facts gleaned from playing with the objects. For example, it is impossible to build higher than ten units in Playplex, and it is difficult not to bend the rods in constructing with Bayko. Because they draw primarily from their personal collection, it is easy to spot the toys that inspired them. Despite relying heavily on their own collection, they do mention the National Building Museum's collection, but they overlook collections at other cultural institutions, such as that at The Strong museum; they prefer citing collectors rather than curators, insisting that bayko.org.uk or brickfetish.com are veritable encyclopedias.The book skillfully weaves materials and visual items, such as the boxes and instruction manuals of the toys, together with physical architecture and information from trade journals. Fourteen roughly chronological chapters follow a formula that makes the book accessible to readers interested in a single construction toy or a quick read. Each short chapter begins with a toy, gives a physical description and its design history, then reveals the toy's role in an issue important to the current architectural profession, such as industrialization, everyday architecture, Cold War architecture, suburbia, and sustainability. For instance, the authors use Wenebrik to explore the rarity of metal buildings and, according to them, how it quickly ages in both toys and buildings.Using artifacts as starting points allows the authors to explore an array of cultural and architectural topics in a way familiar to material culture studies. But the informal style of the book avoids typical academic tools, like a literature review or a methodological description, so whether the authors actually intended to employ a material culture approach remains unclear. The book might well have offered a timely contribution to children's material culture, given the resurgence of scholarship through events like Juliet Kinchin's 2012 Museum of Modern Art exhibit, Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, or Amy Ogata's 2013 Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America. …