Small children like to practice stacking building blocks, the bigger they get, the trickier the construction should be: Whether Lego, Fischer-Technik or Märklin – the building sets from these and other companies are in many German children’s rooms. The Knauf Museum in Iphofen, Lower Franconia, is now devoting a special exhibition to the more than 200-year history of these toys, which opens this Sunday. In the interactive show called “Diversity of the standard – construction kits over the centuries”, children and adults can also try their hand at building masters with the standardized individual parts, promises museum director Markus Mergenthaler.
According to the museum, the construction kit as child’s play, in which individual parts can be put together again and again in new ways, has a long tradition. The first known mentions around 1800 came from the toy catalog of the Nuremberg toy maker Georg Hieronimus Bestelmeier, the “small building blocks” mentioned there contained wooden blocks. Around the middle of the 19th century, the educator Friedrich Fröbel mentioned the educationally valuable, mostly wooden “play gifts”.
In 1882 the Anker stone building set with artificial stones came out, in 1915 the wooden Schweizer building set by Carl Zweifel was popular. Plastic, snap-on Lego bricks came out in 1949. Some kits combine construction with experimentation, while others are all about stacking. Wood, stone, metal and plastic are the typical materials that vary in difficulty. They all have one thing in common: learning while playing. The exhibition with more than 60 building sets from three centuries on around 100 square meters will be on display in the small town in the Kitzingen district until November 5th.