John I. White, songwriter, 1989
Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies,
It's your misfortune, and none of my own.
Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies,
For you know Wyoming will be your new home.
As a child did you have a preference to building structures? Frank Loyd Wright is said to have played / built Fröbel gifts, educational play materials for young children. To master any discipline a young start age can be of a benefit.
Erector sets, (Erector) metal toy construction sets which were originally patented in 1913. Parts included various metal beams with regularly spaced holes for assembly using nuts and bolts.
A frequently promoted patented feature was the ability to fabricate a strong but lightweight hollow structural girder from four long flat pieces of stamped sheet steel, held together by bolts and nuts (US Patent 1,066,809).1
Another game development accompanying the plastics world is the Lego product, the name ‘LEGO’ is an abbreviation of the two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning “play well”.
The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Kristiansen. The company has passed from father to son and is now owned by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, a grandchild of the founder.2
Magna-Tiles are a construction toy system. The pieces are plastic tiles of varying shapes that snap together magnetically, to build various geometric structures.
Magna-Tiles were originally developed in Japan, where they were sold under the name Pythagoras. American salesman Rudy Valenta saw the toy while visiting Japan in 1996 and bought the rights to the toy. He re-branded the toy system "Magna-Tiles" and founded Valtech Co. in 1997 to sell it.3
The Tinkertoy Construction Set is a toy construction set for children.
It was designed in 1914 by Charles H. Pajeau, who formed the Toy Tinker Company Pajeau, a stonemason, designed the toy after seeing children play with sticks and empty spools of thread.4
John Lloyd Wright, the second son of Frank Loyd Wright created a Lincoln Logs.
In 1916, using the blueprint for the Imperial Hotel as a model, he created a toy construction set that consisted of notched pieces of wood that children could stack to build log cabins, forts and other rustic buildings.5
I myself am preferable to the Lincoln logs. Although some of the other construction toys were probably in our household, it is the Lincoln logs identify this. Perhaps because I wanted to be a Carpenter part time, or was enamored with the log cabin of early white settlements west of the Delaware river, for a long time, or at least until we historically destroyed the virgin canopy that occupied much of the unmapped lands in post colonial US of A, for millennia.
I spent untold hours constructing miniaturized buildings with these round wooden notched blocks. Is this too part of the packaging a seeds considered in the zoetic message named Old Architect Myth?
In the mid 1980’s I had a project to detail in drawing document format, about five or more premanufactured Log home residential structures. One take away I recall in detailing is that if one is using “green wood” that is wood not seasoned, dried, one must account for shrinkage in the wall such that if you have wallboard on an interior wall it will not crack when the building settles.
I seemed to really enjoy that project as most likely it was putting me in a mindset working, or shall we say playing, with Lincoln logs as a very young child. As I recall I cannot ever remember participating in a construction project, building, repairing, or restoring a 17th or 18th century log home. That said, I would’ve jumped at the opportunity had it presented itself, to work on those projects, if I could have pursued the work.
I was on a team in Perry County, Ohio in about 1980, which dismantled a barn an house, from within part of the national forest lands. The dismantled goods included chestnut timbers. We transported 19th century timbers and slate to the neighboring Athens County, Ohio. Driving the logging truck alone, affectionately named and painted, “Green-O”, I was stopped by an Ohio State Patrolman and told never to be seen in that truck ever again. It was not such a safe truck.
The resurrected “butterfly” house stands today mixed with modern materials and protected with slate from centuries past.
Lastly, somehow at a very young age I by myself, solo, dismantled and entire barn, size unknown but big, say 40’ x 60’, that had a metal roof on 19 century wood timbers, working single-handedly on the entire barn. What a job, nothing went wrong.
Them were the days no?!
So I’m fairly well convinced that the ways that we engage at a young age will influence us as we go into adulthood. In my case I grew into an architect, I’m playing with construction toys early on.
Did Le Corbusier have construction toys he played with as a child?
Le Corbusier, who went to kindergarten in La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, allied the international style with Fröbel‘s building blocks when he defined architecture as the “masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light: cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage”. He described the Parthenon as a “sovereign cube facing the sea”, as if enlarging Fröbel blocks to building size in his imagination. His Modulor system, patented in 1948, which sought proportional harmony in the mathematics of the human body, also owes much to Fröbel’s gifts.6
Unité d'habitation, Marseilles , France.
Is it summer ‘77 in Paris, we met a French couple, Élan and Christine, who are in the process of getting a divorce and live together as a French do. We hung out with them a lot, we would go to the Greek restaurant dancing and breaking dishes till four in the morning, walking their big Great Dane dog in the park. We really were able to know a French couple. Élan took another American student and myself to the the southwest coastal city in France.
You have heard about the running of the bulls in Pamplona Spain, yes? Now the Basque French residents have their own tradition, much like the Spaniards instead of the running of the bulls they call it the running of the horned cows , but the cows to run in a confined space and you are subject to getting hurt. The festival is five days long, “Fetes de Bayonne”. We were up all night, and playing handball on an open court at sunrise.
I had a great time with Élan, however it was my turn to meet up with the professors traveling 10 days to Switzerland and Italy. We had decided on the port city Marseille, France. I would meet them at the Unité d'habitation. We may have miscommunicated the time, no matter, come I had a great time. I took a train over to Marseille which had a reputation to be in a tough town. I was a little apprehensive. I made my way to the apartment building and began to study it. I studied the building for a full 12 hours.
Fortunately for the one of the residence of the 300 and some odd units invited me into her apartment so that I could receive a first-hand experience of a very unique apartment design within this building. The apartments had a two-story segment and a long one story on the floor below, connected by an interior stairway. One entered the apartment and could go on the stair either up or down depending on the layout. I have just studied this building in college, in depth for sometime, two years prior.
I was very enlivened to see the actual three-dimensional space. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen in US apartment building designs. If I may be so bold as to say, having observed thousands of units in the US, they are very lame in terms of creativity by their architect authors especially when one compares them to Le Corbusier’s Unité Blocks. I was blessed to experience a master works of art.
Entire building sets on Pilotis, there is a rich roof garden with sculptural amenity. The roof is playful with sculptural timeless forms adorning the plane. It is known for its ‘Brutalism” style of Architecture.
A Zoetic Message
It is not our place to tear down the built environment. It is our place to make healthy choices for the materials we use and repurpose, and reuse. More importantly, when we use materials we need to think how the items interlock on a myriad of methods. Just as the big boy’s building blocks of Unité d'habitation are designed in such a way to give the resident extra amenity for the same amount of building goods, so to should we build smartly with Ms. Gaia always in the forethoughts of our plans.
Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erector_Set#cite_note-Watson-1
https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/lego-group/the-lego-group-history/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna-Tiles#cite_note-:0-1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinkertoy
https://www.history.com/news/the-birth-of-lincoln-logs
https://www.iconeye.com/design/features/toys-of-the-avant-garde
The earliest commercial recording of the song was by Harry "Mac" McClintock in 1929 (released on Victor V-40016 as "Get Along, Little Doggies”). Apologies to "Haywire Mac”. Song is said to be a a variation of a traditional Irish ballad about an old man rocking a cradle.
‘The word “dogie” refers to a motherless calf who had to eat grass before being mature enough to digest it. This caused the calf to develop a big stomach which cowboys referred to as “dough guts,” later shortened to “dogies.”‘