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Learning From LEGO
From NYTimes.com
By Thomas de Monchaux
March 15, 2014
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 LEGO. 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.
From:
NYTimes.com
-end of report-
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