Architectus ludens. Giochi di costruzioni/scatole di montaggio

In modernity, the exercise of construction reorganizes the relation between the useful and reality as well as between architecture, technique and purpose. Construction is represented through the assembly of parts characterized by recurring morphologies and measurements. Units, modules and components are assembled according to recognizable sequences that give shape to a building or an industrial product. Those components can also be freely used to compose further forms, other ‘things’ and objects. Through partial modification and internal variation these virtually infinite combinations serve playful purposes. The development of construction toys in the early 20th century translates the noted book Mechanization Takes Command (Giedion 1948) into ‘Mechanics Made Easy’. This transformation is the result of extensive and increasingly complex and articulated boxes containing sets of modular units that can be easily assembled and recombined. Guided by instructions and manuals their assembly produces the micro-stories of an assembly epic. Meccano and LEGO are the most famous examples of this process. These different construction toys create small-scale, playful morphological universes which, despite the difference of their semantic imagination, are both based on the same principle of norm and form. Form is guaranteed by the precision of their uniform and coordinated components. Their identity is determined by the specific material and dimensional characteristics of the individual pieces: Meccano according to the idea of the joint, LEGO through the principle of automatic coupling. These systems of coordinated construction units represent the soul of assembly principles that can be almost endlessly combined. They underpin the notion of ‘learning by doing’, a principle widely used in design education. Construction games are themselves symbolic forms, the simplified outcome of an ‘instinct for form’ something that underpins the very act of building and from which tools and operational processes that represent the extreme synthesis of gestures “without purpose, but full of meaning” are generated (Huizinga [1938] 1949).