Skip to main content

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916)

How many architectural careers have been kindled by Lincoln Logs? Since their invention in the mid-1910s, these deceptively simple wooden building blocks have entertained generations of children, whichever profession they entered upon growing up. I myself have fond memories of playing with Lincoln Logs, which, with about 70 years of history already behind them, were a venerable playtime institution, not that I knew it at the time. I certainly had no idea that they’d been invented by the son of Frank Lloyd Wright — nor, indeed, did I have any idea who Frank Lloyd Wright was. I just knew, as many kids did before me and many do still today, that they were fun to stack up into cabins, or at least cabin-like shapes.


This enduring toy’s full origin story is told in the Decades TV video above. When Wright designed his own family home in Oak Park, Illinois, he included a custom playroom for his six children. Its stock of innovative toys included “geometric building blocks developed by Friedrich Froebel, the German educator who came up with the concept of kindergarten.”

The special fascination for these blocks exhibited by Wright’s second son John Lloyd Wright hinted at a conflict of interests to come: though John “began to feel that spirit of being an architect” in the playroom, says toy historian Steven Sommers, “there was always a tension between his father, who was an architect, and his [own] love for building toys that he’d begun to learn in that Froebel system of early childhood education.” The two intersected when Wright fils assisted Wright père on one of the latter’s most famous works, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

John Lloyd Wright took note of the interlocking timber beams used to make the structure “earthquake-proof” — a design later tested by 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake, which left most of the city destroyed but the Imperial Hotel standing. By that time, the younger Wright had already acted on his inspiration to invent the similarly interlocking Lincoln Logs (see patent drawing above), which quickly proved a hit on the market. Named after the sixteenth president of the United States and the log cabin in which he’d grown up, the product tapped into American frontier nostalgia even at its debut. In the century since, Lincoln Logs have survived wartime material rationing, the rise and fall of countless toy trends, the buying and selling of parent companies, a brief and unappealing late-60s attempt to make them out of plastic, and even the Imperial Hotel itself.  For “America’s national toy,” structural endurance and cultural endurance have gone together.

Related Content:

12 Famous Frank Lloyd Wright Houses Offer Virtual Tours: Hollyhock House, Taliesin West, Fallingwater & More

Frank Lloyd Wright Creates a List of the 10 Traits Every Aspiring Artist Needs

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Creativity, Nature and Religion in Rare 1957 Audio

The Modernist Gas Stations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Son Invented Lincoln Logs, “America’s National Toy” (1916) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3eqoO0y
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...