Still the hippest toy in the box
The 63- year- old brand proves it is still the hippest toy in the box
Lego continues to reinvent itself and maintain its appeal.
In 1935, when American architect Frank Lloyd Wright built his renowned Fallingwater, a private rural Pennsylvania residence with cantilevered levels jutting out over a waterfall, he couldn’t have known that decades later grubby little fingers the world over would be recreating his modern masterpiece in miniature.
But thanks to the masterminds at Lego, the Danish company that introduced its colourful interlocking building blocks in 1949, they are doing just that.
They’re also building the Eiffel Tower. And the White House. And 15 other architectural landmarks from Chicago to South Korea, all part of the company’s slick Architecture series, and just another indication of Lego’s dedication to reinvention as a recipe for success.
Long known for its old- school approach to quiet, thoughtful play, Lego’s increasing popularity stands tall in a nanosecond world where old- fashioned toys like board games and crayons are often doomed to indifference while micro- chipped babysitters are busy kidnapping our children’s attention with the likes of Bad Piggies.
These days, Lego — which means “play well” and which was the invention of Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen — has turned its plastic building blocks into a form of high art.
Designed for small hands and big imaginations, Lego has quietly weathered the toy wars over the decades,
outliving hula hoops and dolls that poop, its appeal growing exponentially with every addition of gears and wheels and windows and little Lego people, with every release of boxed themes like castles and dinosaurs and robots.
Lego’s retro renaissance has most recently been bolstered by its trademarked association with Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings and an assortment of other cartoon and film phenomena familiar to pop culture- savvy children.
So popular is Lego today that its brand has extended to several dozen stand- alone stores around the world — including one in Vancouver’s Oakridge Mall — as well as theme parks, board games, a clothing line and the Lego Ninjago cartoon television series. There’s even a girl- friendly offering called Friends, all of it adding up to a 63- year- old collection so vast that babies can be busy building houses with the over- sized Duplo line while their 15- year- old siblings spend hours putting together the 10,188- piece Star Wars Death Star, an intricate recreation of the film’s famous three- deck, spherical battle station that includes 24 mini- figures, moving parts and a trash compactor monster.
But it’s the niche- market Architecture series, launched in 2008, that is perhaps the most concrete signal that Lego is today the hippest toy in the box.
While the series seems fanciful and aimed, perhaps, at a more sophisticated parent, its genesis doesn’t betray the core raison d’être of the company, at least according to Adam Reed Tucker, who is president of Lego subsidiary Brick structures, and chief designer of the series.
“We wish to promote an awareness of the fascinating worlds of architecture, engineering and construction,” Tucker said at the time of the series’s debut.
The series focuses on readily recognizable public and private buildings and landmarks, such as Chicago’s Sears Tower and John Hancock Center; New York’s Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and Guggenheim Museum; the Eiffel Tower in Paris; and Washington’s White House.
This year, London’s Big Ben, the Sydney Opera House, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in Paris, and Seoul’s Sungnyemun Gate were added to the lineup. In all, there are 17 models in the Architecture series, ranging in size from the 57- piece Space Needle to the 2,276- piece Robie House, another Wright legacy.
With the series’ launch, Tucker pointedly noted that his Lego designs are not “literal replicas” but rather “artistic interpretations that harness the landmark’s overall appeal” and speak to not only the style of the structure but the substance of the engineering.
While millions of toy buyers this Christmas will undoubtedly be drawn to the 2012 Canadian Toy Council top picks — which include, inexplicably, such offerings such as Finger Billiards and a DIY Lip Balm Kit — this much we know is true: Lego is one of those rare toys that owes its longevity to clever reincarnation, and nothing as silly as Finger Billiards will ever be as interesting, educational or cool — for parent or budding architect — as Lego’s 815piece Fallingwater, with its beige and grey monochromatic tiers, its twisted green blocks representing trees and dozens of clear bricks evoking banks of windows and that famous cascading waterfall.