Anchor Stone Building Blocks: Play and the Defeat of Gravity, Berlin, 1877

Anchor Stone Building Blocks (Anker-Steinbaukästen) were building blocks designed by the architect Gustav Lilienthal and his brother, the mechanical engineer and flight pioneer Otto Lilienthal, in Berlin in 1877. Hundreds of shapes of cast stone, in three different colors, were fabricated by machines designed to mass produce building block toys for the first time, and were marketed with great success in Germany and throughout Europe. More realistic looking than previous wooden construction toys—and mimetic of bricks, slate roof and stone tiles—the stones were designed to yield different types of civic structures, from castles to forts to churches. Construction was painstakingly slow and required great patience, as children had to follow very precisely the toys’ detailed plans and elevations.

Following contemporary theories of play and the aesthetics of movement, this paper proposes that the Anchor Blocks fulfilled multiple, diverging functions—beyond the sheer pleasure of play—by providing a sense of lightness and rootedness simultaneously. Transporting distant structures, such as Rhineland castles, into the urban home, the toys broke down earlier, nineteenth-century conceptions of fixed, lateral space, instead intimating lightness, mobility, and a move out of the congested city. At the same time, this set of heavy miniature bricks acted as an ‘anchor’ to mitigate the frightening unsteadiness experienced when looking at the city from above. Contemporaneous with the advent of the bird’s eye view, enabled by the astonishing development of flight and structures such as the Eiffel Tower, the blocks’ miniaturization of the environment paralleled the appearance of the industrialized metropolis as visualized from above. Designed for children but marketed to (gift-giving) adults, who were experiencing in their daily lives a potentially disorienting vertigo in the metropolis’ high-rise buildings and suspension bridges, the Anchor Blocks allowed children and their parents to ‘toy with height’ on the living room floor.