The simple innocence of Lego is in pieces

Hollywood tie-ins and the vulgar motives of greedy adults have tarnished the image of the plastic bricks.

The street value of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene is going up. ABS is the plastic used to make Lego. It lends itself to precision moulding and most parents will know only too well the sharp spasm of agony felt when treading upon a carelessly abandoned brick while creeping out of a child's bedroom at night.

There may be enough Lego in the world for every single person to own 86 bricks, but demand still beats supply. This week, the announcement that Lego cannot meet its Christmas orders will inflame hysteria and inflate prices. Plastic bricks may be a better investment than gold.

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Lego lust has already stimulated an international crime wave. A New York woman was arrested for stealing 800 box sets. A syndicate of thieves specialising in Lego emerged in Phoenix. There have been Lego-related truck-jackings in Watford Gap and armed burglaries in Australia. The once innocent children's toy has become a vulgar object of feverishly traded novelty among adult mouth breathers.

For while Lego was innocent, it was never stupid. If you want a demonstration of the accelerating infantilism of contemporary culture, look at Lego. It used to be a thoughtful plaything, now it's all about Hollywood tie-ins which have simultaneously saved its business while degrading its intelligence. In the matter of global toys, Lego is now bigger than Barbie, but perhaps no brighter.

Yet Lego's origins lie deep in the history of European pedagogy, and then became co-mingled with the Scandinavian design ethic. In 1840 Friedrich Froebel coined the term Kindergarten, the garden motif suggesting constructive growth, not learning by rote. Froebel created a system of geometrical bricks enabling children to build structures in his figurative garden. Froebel was a fundamental influence on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bauhaus used coloured building blocks as its logo.

A century after Froebel, Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Jutland, began experimenting in plastic to create a construction toy. He patented Lego on January 28 1958, the name being a contraction of the Danish words for "play well": Scandinavian social purpose at work.

His Lego is a simple thing that is also very sophisticated. The bricks are precisely 16mm x 16mm x 9.58mm and moulded to a tolerance of two microns. Their size and proportions encourage intelligent decisions about structures, stimulating a child's imagination as did Froebel's blocks, rather than hobbling it with images of Yoda and Boba Fett.

And since Lego is so intelligently designed and so expertly manufactured, playing with it forms in the child's mind an early impression about the values of accuracy and quality. A foolish child might be immediately beguiled by Grand Theft Auto, but it takes character and imagination and patience to get the best out of Lego.

In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright said of his building blocks: "I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I learned to see. I wanted to design." Lego has repaid the compliment by selling boxed sets of Wright's Imperial Hotel and Guggenheim Museum.

But the problem with Hollywood tie-ins, or even with Lego Technic or its Architecture series, is that each is prescriptive and undermines the free essence of Lego. The elemental bricks assumed levels of refinement, discrimination, taste and imagination in the child. It was the ultimate open-ended system with infinite potential for the user to explore ideas of his own.

These days Lego wants to sell you media-mandated role-playing fantasies, or to instruct you to build a Mercedes truck or a McLaren P1. It's an affluence that diminishes the child's imagination, while feeding the cupidity of the semi-literate. Lego once showed that play is constructive. Now it prefers to show you Gandalf, Elves and the Pirate of Umbar. No longer about learning-by-doing, interaction, imagination or experience, it is about exploiting the credulous.

Lego once showed that simplicity was not the same as commonplace. But in an over-busy world, simplicity counts for little. Lego now, alas, proves another principle: no one ever went bust underestimating the public's taste.