Learning From Legos
WHEN
I was a boy, my father, an architect, attempted a no-toy policy, with
the significant exception that he’d buy my brother and me almost
anything — any birthday, holiday or restless rainy Saturday — as long as
it was Lego.
And
so, if I needed a gun, I made it with Legos. The same with a
walkie-talkie. And a lie detector. And all the life-size artifacts —
let’s face it, mostly weapons — that were then my heart’s desire. Plus
every scale-model spaceship, supertruck, planetary fortress, recombinant
Tyrannosaurus and transforming robot.
These
days Lego — with its namesake movie’s opening weekend box office of $69
million, and with global sales revenue tripling, recession-proof,
between 2007 and 2012 — appears to be something more than just a Danish
construction toy based on snap-together plastic bricks. Some of the
film’s success comes from the charm of its intrepid construction worker
hero and goth-ninja heroine, both remarkably expressive despite the
limitations of Lego figurines’ cylindrical heads and hands.
But
the film’s celebration of adaptive improvisation and spontaneous
mythmaking also resonates deeply with our current moment of so-called
maker culture. Thanks to new rapid-prototyping technologies like
computer numerical control milling and 3-D printing, we’ve seen a
convergence between hacker and hipster, between high-tech coding and the
low-tech artisanal craft behind everything from Etsy to Burning Man.
Whether
it’s Google’s first server rack having been made of Lego-like bricks
(pragmatically cheap, heat-resistant and reconfigurable) at Stanford in
1996, or the programmable Lego bricks developed at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s Architecture Machine Group (later the Media
Lab where, no coincidence, my father worked), Lego is literally built
into the computational and architectural history of maker culture.
And
it is, in a special way, an architectural history. “A small interior
world of color and form now came within grasp of small fingers,” wrote
Frank Lloyd Wright about his 9-year-old self in a 1943 autobiographical
sketch. “These ‘Gifts’ came into the gray house” and “made something
live here.” These were the famous Froebel Blocks,
educational wooden building blocks in systematic shapes and sizes
developed in the 1840s by Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of
kindergarten.
“The
smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which
never afterward leaves the fingers; so form became feeling. These
primary forms were the secret of all effects,” Wright recalled, “which
were ever got into the architecture of the world.” Wright’s son John
would complete the circle, inventing in 1916 the construction toy that
came to be known as Lincoln Logs.
Architectural
historians have sought origins for Wright’s innovative organic
architecture — his long horizontals and pinwheel plans — in the
geometries of his toys, even reconstructing his early house designs
using the Froebel Blocks themselves.
I
suspect that the connection isn’t that literal. But it is certainly
primal, and visceral, to do with the idea of making and unmaking, and
the complex relationships of parts to wholes, and brokenness to
wholeness.
Once,
detouring through a parking-lot flea market, I stumbled across some
Froebel Blocks from Wright’s era, stacked as tightly and delicately as
the dovetail joints of their original wooden box. Froebel Blocks are
collectible antiques, but these were flea-market finds and not
auctioneers’ goods because they had been methodically defaced by years
of scribbled arabesques in Magic Marker, in a child’s hand.
I
discovered that these lines traveled continuously from block to block,
and that by carefully aligning the distinctly colored arcs and loops of
the markings, I could reconstruct all the arrangements into which the
blocks had been built — those magic marks the inadvertent blueprints for
a forgotten memory palace.
I
remember the fugue of that reconstruction, low on the ground below a
flea market table. I remember the astonishing intimacy of visiting a
stranger’s childhood, and how that intimacy somehow caused me to delay
actually buying this treasure. I circled the flea market, and returned
to find it gone.
Maker
culture, like Lego, is about loss. All building-block toys are about
appearance and disappearance, demolition and reconstruction. Maker
culture, for all its love of stuff, is similarly a culture of
resourcefulness in an era of economic scarcity: relentless in its
iterative prototyping, its radically adaptive reuse of ready-made
objects, its tendency to unmake one thing to make another — all in a new
ecology of economy.
When
my brother and I wanted a new toy, we cannibalized whatever we’d made
before, which had been made of all the things we’d ever made before
that. So of all those years of guns and starships, I have only that
Wrightian feeling for form in the fingertips — and the sound, somewhere
between rustling and clinking, of a thousand plastic pieces tumbling
from an overturned bucket into a disorderly pile, rippling away from a
seeking hand.
I
remember the last thing I ever made of Lego, far later into adolescence
than I should admit. It was a robot that, thanks to double-jointed
hinges, could continually reconfigure itself without being disassembled.
And in this sense it was anti-Lego, capable of being remade without
being unmade. I knew that it was the most I could ever do in the medium,
and the end of an era. It drifted back into that bucket.
A
quarter-century later I saw the same bucket opened and overturned by a
young nephew. And there, like a time traveler, was this same robot.
Mostly just its legs, standing Ozymandias-like in a pile of bricks. I
reached for it, but not faster than my nephew, who, recognizing an
accretion of especially useful pieces, instantly dissolved it with his
hands. One of Wright’s secrets of all effects must be this: Because
nothing comes from nothing, and nothing goes entirely out of the world,
you have to take things apart if you seek to put everything together.
Thomas de Monchaux is an architect who is writing a book about trucks, forts and dinosaurs.