Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys explores how in the last two hundred years, architectural toys – blocks and construction sets – have echoed full-scale architectural experimentations. Architectural toys have provided evidence of the social and economic life of their period; have reflected stylistic inclinations and have incorporated technological changes in their ‘systems of construction’. Designed by adults for children, these toys have presented an intersection between generations and a meeting point between pedagogy and means of production. Four construction toys are investigated – dating from 1836 to 1952 and made of wood, stone, metal and paper. With the advent of industrialization, they have indicated changing attitudes towards form, structure and permanence. They have classified and divided the environment, and through play provided tools to recreate its orders.

Froebel’s Gifts designed in1836 included a series of cubes, spheres and cylinders that were gradually broken down to smaller geometrical parts and were introduced to children in the Kindergarten setting; Anchor Stone Building Blocks invented in1877 comprised hundreds shapes of miniature stones that yielded castles, forts and churches; Meccano (1901) and Erector Set (1911) included small metal girders that constructed bridges and skyscrapers mimetic of contemporary steel structures; while The Toy and House of Cards designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1950 and 1952 were lightweight, cardboard kits-of-parts that echoed methods of prefabrication.

Allowing for a large array of assemblies and connections, all case-studies shared the breakdown of contemporary conventions of architecture. A structured dissection of natural formations was followed by the decomposition of known molds of space, to be replaced by light building parts, suggesting prefabrication and mobility gradually questioning the nature of the house. Thus, play with construction sets wavered between getting used to an existing reality while simultaneously performing the destruction of that same reality. The vision offered by the construction toy enacted persistently an image of collapse. Breakdown and collapse, construction and taking apart have positioned architectural toys as tools that appeared to advance – at all times – the constant reevaluation of spatial design. Lightness of building materials, modularity, systematization and greater versatility were parts of an architectural language that the toys exemplified. In the intimacy of the domestic environment, eradicating formal habits and re-conceiving visual orders, architectural toys intimated notions of the modern.