The Three Kings. Toys and Architecture after WWII

Before the Second World War the avant-gardes proposed many ideas on toys and games, and this is a constantly exercise between designers and architects Many designers appreciate the power and potential for toys to inspire children and get them thinking about space, materials, and the joy of construction itself. Today is the Three Kings holiday, in Spain and another countries, below, a little list.

1947. Tyng Toy by Anne Tyng

Architect Anne Tyng developed her Tyng Toy in 1947, the year she joined Louis Kahn’s Philadelphia practice. Developing the modular, slot-together building set (whose 21 pieces can be assembled into a rocking horse or a mini-car among other things!) was a stepping stone in the development of her groundbreaking ideas about architecture and geometry. Her relationship with Kahn was both professional and emotional, as she fathered one of his children. This project makes Tyng an equal of Ray and Charles Eames or Isomu Noguchi.

Tyng was the first female graduate of Harvard's engineering program, and a student of Buckminster Fuller. In 1949 Anne Tyng was the only woman in Pennsylvania to receive her architecture license. Tyng taught at Penn's architecture school for many years where many got to know her. She was truly one of the toughest critics.

Doll's House by Gerrit Rietveld

Like many toys, doll’s houses teach children how to live and a spatial vision of the adult world. In offering up the entire domestic world at a glance, doll’s houses also reflect, in particular, how objects surround human lives and exert their influence on us.

Below, the first doll’s house was designed by Gerrit Rietveld, one of the most important furniture designers, architects, and advocates of modernism in the early twentieth century. It was made for the children of the Jesse family. Here, the children—Anita and Matcheld—could envision a pared-down lifestyle, surrounded by tasteful modern objects, in the postwar world.

1951-59. The Toy by Eames Office

1951 – 1959. The Eames Office designed The Toy for adults, teenagers, and children to use as sets for amateur theatrics, as room decoration, or as tents for other toys and objects. The outside label read, “Large-Colorful-Easy to Assemble-For Creating A Light, Bright Expandable World Large Enough To Play In and Around.”

The Toy included colorful square and triangular panels, thin wooden dowels with pierced ends, and pipe cleaners for connectors.

The Office originally made large, oblong packaging for The Toy, but the owner of Tigrett Industries said stores would have difficulty shipping and shelving something in such a large box. In response, Charles and Ray created a hexagonal tube that fit the needs of the retail shops carrying the product.

1957 – 1958. The Eameses designed the Solar Do-Nothing Machine in 1957.  True to their belief that toys are not as innocent as they appear, the machine represents one of the first uses of solar power to produce electricity.

Charles and Ray made this design after the agency Ketchum, MacCleod and Grove asked them to create a toy as part of an advertising campaign for the Aluminum Company of America (or Alcoa).

2012. Dowel-blocks by Torafu

Recently, Japanese firm Torafu Architects emulated Anne Tyng’s toy with its own dowel-block toy allowing children to build anything from cameras to skyscrapers with colored blocks of assorted shapes.

Fun polyester decorative plywood blocks can be joined with doweling to form various shapes – the only limit is your imagination. Holes on five sides allows the blocks to be connected three-dimensionally in an infinite number of ways.

2015. Inside Out by Coffey Architects, Electra House by David Adjaye and anothers.

Inspired by the dolls’ house that Edwin Lutyens designed for The British Empire Exhibition in 1922, the Cathedral Group asked twenty British practices, including models by Coffey Architects, Zaha Hadid and David Adjaye, were each designing a contemporary dolls’ house in aid of the disabled childrens’ charity KIDS. Each version was sit on a 750mm square plinth was auctioned at Bonham's on the 11th November and contains one feature which would make life easier for a disabled child.

The event saw over 400 guests come together to celebrate and bid on the selection of dolls’ houses. The highest bid of the evening was for Zaha Hadid’s dolls’ house, ‘This must be the place’ reaching an impressive £14,000. Not far behind was the 1.5m high dolls’ house by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, who also designed the new showroom at Bonhams in which the auction was held, which went for £11,000.

2015. Tsumiki Building Blocks by Kengo Kuma

Kengo Kuma, who is one of Japan’s most respected architects, launched a new game set of wooden building blocks, entitled Tsumiki, addressed to children of all ages, a modelling kit made up of triangular-shaped wooden pieces, which has been described as the Japanese alternative to Lego.

'I have loved tsumiki my whole life, ever since I was a young boy,' says Kuma. 'And my dream came true, I designed tsumiki myself, the sort which hadn't existed before.' The set is 'not a heavy, masonry kind of wood block, but a light, transparent system just like what you see in traditional Japanese architecture', he added.

Created in collaboration with musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and his forest conservation organisation More Trees, and is constructed from Japanese cedar wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. This architectural game can be used to create structures of all shapes and sizes - as well as raise awareness about the environmental problems caused by the dangerous deforestation on our planet. 

Named Tsumiki -Japanese for building blocks- the individual components can be stacked and arranged in a variety of formations to create unique sculptures.