Posts I Like: Toys to Inspire Budding Architects and Designers

With only a few days before Christmas and grand-children of my own, I felt this would be a great article for those people who still haven't found the right gift for the young persons in their lives.

Posted On:  Houzz by Victoria Villeneuve  |  15 December 2015

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s blocks, cards by Eames and more toys from around the globe tap into kids’ imaginations and build skills.

A present from his mother laid the foundation for 9-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright’s lifelong interest in architecture. “I … played with the cube, the sphere and the triangle,” he wrote about the blocks — originated by Friedrich Froebel, the father of kindergarten — that his mother had picked up at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, the first World’s Fair in the United States. “I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I learned to see this way, and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals of nature. I wanted to design.”

This holiday season, you too can help launch a child’s love of design with these 12 architecture-inspired toys from around the world, from replicas of Wright’s blocks to the latest construction kits and dollhouses.

1. Froebel Gifts. “The maplewood blocks are all in my fingers to this day,” Frank Lloyd Wright wrote at age 88 of the gift he received as a child. Now rendered in beech, replicas of the original six Fröbelgaben (Froebel’s Gifts) — playthings of increasing geometric complexity invented by the German educator in the 1830s — are available today from Red Hen Books and Toys.

Photo from Froebel USA

The influence of Wright’s beloved blocks is apparent in the simple geometry of the Winslow House (1893) in River Forest, Illinois, his first major commission as an independent architect. He considered the symmetrical home beneath a sloping roof with wide eaves his original Prairie house.

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