Lego - The Building Blocks of Architecture The Culture Show

There are 86 pieces of Lego for every person on the planet. Somehow

a tiny plastic brick has become part of all our childhoods. It's the

ultimate toy, isn't it? Because it doesn't have any rules. What Lego

allows you to do is dip into a big bucket of mess and pull out these

bricks and slowly make something which is uniquely yours. Made a

police station. It's a house on wheels. It's good! With wings. We

spend nearly ?3 billion a year on Lego and now it's expanding its

empire into Hollywood. Good morning apartment, ready to start the day...

Always be sure to keep the soap out of your... Lego might be an enormous

brand, but it has a strong relationship with the real buildings

around us. It is, after all, a brick. What actually goes on when

you play with Lego? You take a spatial unit and you add it to

another and there's a bigger space being built. You remember how you

did it. And you remember how that brick felt on your finger. Toys like

Lego help us play at being architects. Most of us lose that

ability. But some people keep it and they haven't stopped building. I

wouldn't be able to imagine my childhood without Lego. The toys

they played with as children have helped inspire some of the most

important buildings of our time. Lego is not just a kids' toy.

There's a direct connection between Lego and the real world, the

buildings we create all around us. I think that Lego has changed the way

we think about architecture. Lego can transport you anywhere your

imagination can take you. So, I've come to Billund in Denmark,

population 6,000, it's home to Legoland, Denmark's largest tourist

attraction outside Copenhagen. The only problem is, it's closed in

winter. But I'm here to see something much more exciting.

I have played with Lego since I was two or three years old. It's a

complete dream come true to come to a Lego factory. In 2019 there will

be more mini figures in the world than there actually are people.

You're joking? No, I'm not. It's like a maternity ward. Yeah! Lego

produces 45 billion pieces a year, that's 1450 every second. I might

stick to architecture. Through Lego, we realise robots and Star Wars,

spaceships and helicopters. At the root of all these creations is a

simple brick. That's no accident. Lego's beginnings are steeped in

building. The story of Lego begins here at this house in Billund, built

in 1924. It was the creation a local carpenter called Ole Kirk

Christiansen, who from humble beginnings would establish the

mighty lowingo empire. -- Lego empire. He loved to play. You could

walk by outside and you would probably get a bucket of water on

your head. That was how he was. He was really, really a great man. He

loved children. In England we say we have a big character, a really big

character. Yeah. A few years later. He's plumper. Yeah u, he is. --

Yeah, he is. Married, three kids, wife, doing well for himself. Yes.

He was the carpenter of choice here, crafting barns and furniture for the

farming community. His lofty ambition didn't stop at wood. It

included the brick. These are some of the buildings he make. This is a

farm. This is from 1921. We're talking real buildings. Real

buildings, yeah. That's amazing to see them. That's where it all began.

Everything was looking great, probably have ended up being a

carpenter for the rest of life, but then things started going not so

well. In 1932, tragedy struck. Ole's wife died in child birth, leaving

him as a widower with four children. When the Great Depression spread

across Europe, Ole and his neighbours faced ruin. 1932 there

was a crisis, there was no income. He couldn't get the money the

farmers owed him because they had none. The farmers no longer wanted

barns or houses, so he decided to make goods he could afford. These

are the kind of toys he was making. They're quite... Robust. Es! I like

the eyes at the front. These are some of the first ones. He was

pretty much experimenting at that time, trying something new. In 1934,

Ole named his business Lego after the Danish loget -- legot, to play

well. His brother didn't like it. They didn't think it was a serious

business with a future, but they were wrong! You could say.

From the 1930s, toys were becoming serious business. Prewar a lot of

the most influential philosophers and early years educators had come

to the conclusion that children learn through play, they learn

through their hands and the hand is an extension of the brain. The idea

of play and developing toys, which encouraged a certain kind of good

play,if you like, learning through play, became very much the currency

of the age. During the Nazi occupation of

Denmark, anxious parents bought the wooden toys to cheer up their

children. Wood was needed for fuel, when Denmark was running out. So in

1946, Ole bought a new bit of kit, a plastic moulding machine. You push

that, really hard. You just keep it there. This would have been

cutting-edge technology in 1946. Yeah, it was. He started off making

toy teddy bears, but he knew the machine could do more.

# Little boxes on the hillside... # Ole and his team spent a decade

researching, developing and developing plastic toys. The brick

they created chimed powerfully with the new mood of the age. In the

aftermath of World War II, the thinkers of Europe were on a quest

to rebuild their shattered communities. The figure of the child

was key. So many toys are about destruction and Lego is about

construction. It seems to be about learning how to be a good person by

building, by creating a better world. I love that idea. The 1950s

when cities all over Europe were rebuilding themselves and town

planning was a big subject, I love the fact that Lego, the first thing

it does is a town plan. We needed engineers. We needed

architects. How do you get engineers and architects? Well you show them

buildings and you encourage them to construct those buildings with

building blocks. There's a long tradition of architects seeking out

construction toys as children. In the 1870s a young boy called Francis

played with these blocks. This early play sparks a passion for structure,

space and form and was a powerful outlet for creative exploration.

That boy grew up to build buildings like these, the great American ark

tech Frank Lloyd Wright blew away Victorian, stuffy conventional

architecture with his asymmetric compositions, which he said were

heavily influenced by Frobels blocks, he continued to use the

blocks when a grown-up architect. Alone, the blocks inspired Le

Corbusier and Walter Gropius, the founders of modernism. The

architecture they pioneered in the 1920s was stripped down and

unadorned but full of idealistic intention. They believed in an equal

and humane society with affordable, well-designed housing for all. And

the post-war years gave them and their followers the chance to

realise their dream through a radical innovation. The prefab.

Flat-pack or system-built housing, produced a factory, and assembled on

site was a low-cost vision of utopia. By the 1970s, these

ubiquitous, often austere towers were proving unpopular. People were

desperate for fresh ideas. You could see in the centre of every city,

there were glass blocks, the boring box was a phrase. It failed in terms

of taste because it didn't have enough variety. Two schools of

architecture emerged that challenged the post-war earnest, modernist

blocks, one was embodied by Lego, the other by the other great

construction toy of the Twentieth Century, Meccano.

Mechanics made easy, Meccano in the 60s was Britain's most popular

construction toy. Lego's popularity was growing, but it couldn't yet

match Meccano's might. Children everywhere saved up their pocket

money to buy it. I fell to it like a duck to water. One of the reasons I

became an architect, I'm sure, because I had spent a lot of time

playing with something which you could physically create things with.

My partner, Richard Rogers played Meccano as a child. The processes

which Meccano illustrated at the time are still endemic in our

building. Through the spirit of Meccano, ark tech -- architects

brought something everyone else wanted buried a prefab. Like the

modernist blocks of the 50s, these buildings were made in a factory.

Pop p due -- Pompey due is the classic -- Pompidou is the classic

example. It's essentially a giant Meccano. Quick to build and

assemble, like Pompidou, the Lloyds building was produced in a factory

and brought to site on the back of a lorry. When I was a kid, this was

the building that really turned me on to architecture. I'd never seen

anything like it. Britain had never seen anything like it. Just look at

it. This is architecture made through science and engineering and

rather than hide that away, Richard Rogers celebrated it, putting the

surfaces on the outside. The result is a building that's in the high

pressure heart of the City, but doesn't feel that way. Inside, you

get this incredible sense of space. These vast open floors, which in the

mid-80s were incredibly modern, radical in a stuffy old world of the

City. They call this architecture hi-tech, engineering embodied in the

architecture and infused with the spirit of Meccano. Meccano is a

technological toy. In that sense, the thing that's interesting about

Meccano and about a lot of the architecture of what's called

hi-tech is it's actually understandable. You can understand

how it's made. There's no mystery. That's the aesthetic of the

building. By 1978, the year the Lloyds building was commissioned,

Meccano was no longer the world's most popular construction toy. Lego

was simpler, safer and appealed to much younger children and those who

weren't very good with a spanner, like me. That very same year, a new

school of architecture began to emerge. It had a strong sense of the

building block, but not the bare concrete slabs of the 60s. These new

buildings were fun. People were looking for a more playable --

playful, accessible architecture. Post modernist brought back colour

and metaphor. They may not have intentionally made their buildings

look like Lego, but they were doing the same thing, reducing buildings

to a language that everyone can understand, circles, cylinders,

squares and triangles and creating great architecture from it. Number 1

Poultry was created by one of the key figures in post modern

architecture, James Stirling. Jim was always, he wanted to be

different. If the world had caught up to him, he would go on somewhere

else. He must have thought about Lego, when he was building, because

they're put together like toy blocks. They're very volume-metric.

He was a classicist and a Legocist if you like. By the time Stirling's

Number 1 Poultry was completed in 1997, post modernism was a dirty

word. Too many bad post modern buildings were run up quickly. It

suffered because things are copied to death and ripped off and

prostituted and watered down. Post modernism went down. Although post

modernism fell from favour, Lego's influence on architecture remained.

In the 70s, as plastic bricks dominated the world's playrooms and

toy shops, a new breed of architects was born. Its Rising Star has

started to build. Isn't that great, that sound. Fantastic. A pile of

potential. Exactly! At 39 years old, Bjarke Ingels is the leading

architect of his generation and a huge lowingo fan. -- Lego fan. I

wouldn't be able to imagine my childhood without Lego. What would

you build, when you were a kid? It was very much these James Bond

villain's lairs. Secret revolving doors or sliding walls. I was into

the idea that the architecture could contain unseen possibilities, things

seem to be a certain way, but then they could actually do so much more.

Bjork's childhood vision has influenced his architecture today.

Where others see problems, he sees potential. He's won prestigious

commissions all over the world. He's construct being a waste incinerator

that powers a ski slope. Designed in entirely carbon neutral island in

the Caspian Sea and he will soon turn a pile of bricks into the Lego

House, the corporations new museum and HQ in Billund. It's his dream

commission and it might inspire generations of children to see Lego

as more than a toy. Lego is really like the most blatant way to turn an

idea into action. You don't need tools or knives, even glue. It's a

bit like grabbing a pencil and just drawing away on paper. Immediate,

you've got it. It's a three dimensional sketch tool. He used

this tool to find a modern solution to a familiar problem. How to make

imaginative buildings from prefab blocks. Our labour wages are so high

and our weather is so wet, you actually want to minimise the time

spent on the construction site. You want to arrive with a lot of

preassembled elements and put them together quickly. In effect, over

the last 60 years Denmark has become a cub trip entirely -- country

entirely built out of Lego, or at least prefabricated MoD udges. If

people are -- modules, if people are all different, why do suddenly all

buildings look the same? Den marks towers of today provoke boredom. But

the towers from the past inspire wonder. He was determined to create

a tower block every bit as fantastical, creative and fun. Could

he build with the restrictions of Danish construction, using prefab

blocks that all look the same? He turned to the bricks of his

childhood to propose an idea of the modern high rise that is as

inventive as radical. These are conceived as individual Lego blocks.

You preassemble everything at home and put the blocks together when you

arrive at the site. From a factory-made kit of identical moth

you'ds he has created not -- modules, he has created a lush,

man-made landscape of valleys and mountains. It's a crazy project. A

lot of architects can be serious and that's why they build serious boxes.

Did it inspire people? It really made people look at architecture in

a completely different way. In architecture, when you have a chance

to intervene, you should try to realise the city you dream about

living in. It doesn't have to be like it is. Our cities are only the

way they are because that's how far we've gotten. That's what Lego

enables anyone to do, just to put together, in a very simple way, a

lot of almost identical bricks to create what a city can be and what a

city should be. Your own city might not be that great, but on the living

room floor, you can re-arrange things and make the world as it

should be. I think the important thing behind Lego is that it's a

better world, that it's a chance to improve on the world as it is now.

So it's a chance to be idealistic. Utopian ideals, child-like dreams of

the future, through the innocence of play, we tap into our visions of

remaking the world anew. For the artist, Olafur Eliasson, play is

full of powerful possibility. What actually goes on when you play with

Lego? It's a very interesting thing. You take a spatial unit and then you

compose it, almost like a score, you compose it together and you add it

to another and there's a bigger space being built. You're not a

consumer, you're a producer. Olafur Eliasson turns a public into

protagonist of a collective work of art. At the Weather Project at

Tate's Turbine Hall onlookers became part of his giant insulation. --

installation. In 2005, he travelled to Albania and used play to bring

people together as they built a new city from scratch. After 50 years of

Communism, the transition from dictatorship to democracy looked

uncertain. For the collectivity project, Eliasson took three tons of

white Lego and dumped them in the town square of Tirana, Albania's

capital city. I thought of this table experiment as a way of

creating a little Parliament, where people on the street would negotiate

with each other. In Albania the idea of open political debate was new and

so was Lego. Lego had not had a life in Albania. For a lot of people it

was like, wow, look at this. Isn't this plastic interesting. What is it

called? And what does it do? People were invited to rebuild Tirana with

Lego. What does it mean to share space? What does it mean to

coproduce space? Suddenly you're next to somebody you might not know,

then you see that person is building something and can I add something to

that? Or can I put something next to it? Are we building a city together.

To Olafur this city had radical potential. I think it added elements

to a discussion which was already going on. And trying to develop a

set of values, which would reflect where the country was going. The

fact that you can look upon your own city, in which you are, as a model,

if you start to look at reality as a model, it is much more likely to be

negotiable. If it's negotiable, it can change. To Olafur, Lego is a

blank canvas of simple, white bricks. For most of us, there's a

lot more on offer, even a controversial pink-coloured range,

especially for girls. The Lego of today is available in 9,000

different colours, shapes and sizes. It's quite incredible. Look at that,

bags within bags, with these incredibly, complicated little rings

and God only knows what that is, a little whip on something. It started

as simple bricks and you can still get these simple bricks, but it's

become less like this creative freedom and more like a jigsaw

puzzle. Do you know what fills my heart with fear? That! Look at that.

When I was a kid you had a limited range of options, you had to use

your imagination and think outside the box. Now it's all so complicated

and branded. It's drifted far from its original ideals. I think that

the Lego corporation is deeply divided as to what it's trying to

do. It's heavily compromised by its commercial ambitions. In recent

years it's become a corporation that's really ripping off the

imagination of children by selling them ready-made nonsense from films.

Rest in pieces. In fact the new Lego movie, out this week, tackles this

very issue of directed versus free, creative play, settling on the idea

that it takes all sorts to be a Lego enthusiast. Relax everybody, I'm

here. Batman! And of course, once you've watched it, you can buy The

Lego Movie kit and recaet it at home. -- re-create it at home. Yet

our simple desire to build from only blocks and imagination hasn't gone

away. It's the digital world that's picking up where plastic bricks left

off. Paving the way of video game Minecraft. This is forwards. So W is

forward? W is forward. U to place a box. What are you doing there? I'm

making the shelter. Never have I felt more old than I'm feeling now.

Minecraft is a virtual world where players build their own creations

with 3D blocks. With more than 42 million users, it's a huge, global

phenomenon. Minecraft is a digital equivalent of Lego. It's not the

re-invention of Lego, it's the spirit of what Lego is. Lego is

about building a building. Minecraft is about building a world, building

an environment, bimeding an environment -- building an

environment that me and my friends can go around. Everything is cuby?

Everything is pixellated. Oh, right OK. I'm getting it. As soon as you

go into the world and you put down one block, you get it, I can put

these blocks down. That's where it takes you on a journey of

creativity. It's not like oh, do this, do that. It's do you want to

do this, because you can. If you're thinking, I want to make a massive

castle, you can. But you just have to have the resources. There are no

limits. There are no limits to what you can do. Through the internet,

huge groups of players can join forces and build things together.

Any number of people can join in. How many of your friends play this?

A lot. Basically everyone in the class. Everyone in my class probably

as well. It socialises the game. When people come together and create

one thing, just some amazing things start happening. The scale of

Minecraft is epic, but its worlds aren't limited to fantasy.

Architects and town planners are using this building block game to

transform our cities into places we actually want to live in. This is my

old neighbourhood in East London. There's definitely room for

improvement, but how do you make yourself heard? You wouldn't want to

walk down there at midnight on your own. Through Minecraft, we'll all be

able to make our cities safer, cleaner and smarter. We're going to

have a drift through the neighbourhood. Let's set off.

My old stomping ground has been transformed into a 3D model. Thanks

to Benachir Mebjdoub. Through the model I can make virtual

improvements and local City councillors will be able to see

them. There's a dark area here. Absolutely yes. You could improve

this. The best way is to put some lighting. Let's see that in

architecture, proper flames like in the Roman times. Yes. It's feeling

maybe a little brighter. If you were down there on your own, you might

not be as nervous. You will feel safer with a better lighting. We can

see how easy it is to use. It's two see how easy it is to use. It'stwo

two clicks. People can interact with this. Absolutely. A child can use

blocks to build up a house etc. You can access with the project while

seating at home. That will certainly foster participation from the

community. That will give much more power to the neighbourhood. Through

Minecraft, an entire community can team up online and redesign their

neighbourhood en masse. It's been tested in Stockholm with the project

Blockholm. The UN have use today with young people in Kenya to

regenerate urban areas in desperate need of restructuring. Minecraft

enables people to think about the ecosystem of things and that's going

to be fascinating how that evolves. I have no doubt that the ack tects

of tomorrow will -- architects of tomorrow will have played Minecraft

as children, absolutely no doubt. Who knows what kind of architects,

what kind of buildings the construction toys of the future will

produce. For me, there's something so inspirational about holding a

simple block in the palm of your hand. No developer would ever pay

for that because there's only room for the elevator. This was supposed

to be a camera, like a viewpoint to look into the future. This is Tom at

the end of the Lego rainbow.