A Children’s Utopia

Printed on the side of the red cardboard box is the name Ingenius-Minimal. The cover illustration promises an amazing experience. We see deep canyons criss-crossing among countless skyscrapers. The buildings are austere with nothing but rectangular windows spanning the facades. Their number extends beyond the picture and impresses us with their height. From our perspective, we’re standing on the 22nd floor, gazing over several high-rises into a bright blue sky. Large letters, erected atop a reddish-orange bridge, form the words “The New City”.

Skyscrapers were a relatively new phenomenon in Germany in the 1920s. They symbolised the modern-day city and were said to hold the key to alleviating the lack of affordable housing. Instructors and students at the Bauhaus also devoted themselves to the topic. The Bauhaus master Georg Muche designed a residential high-rise with spacious terraces. The urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer created plans for entire housing estates featuring a mix of high- and low-rise structural units. And the Bauhaus directors Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius both participated in skyscraper design competitions.

Building sets for kids were not a new invention. In the mid-19^th century, a new pedagogical movement pushed for innovative concepts in school, education and child-rearing. The aim was to foster creativity in children. Children could stack the 53 blocks to build towers and create a miniature world. The enclosed booklet contained pictures of the spectacular possibilities.

The Ingenius building set was designed around 1924 by the architects Wilhelm Kreis (1873–1955) and Carl August Juengst (biographical data unknown). Neither of them had attended the Bauhaus. Kreis made a name for himself around 1900 for building more than 40 monuments in Germany. In the early 1920s, he designed the Wilhelm Marx building, one of the first high-rises in Düsseldorf. Juengst was probably a colleague working in Kreis’s architectural firm, though there is hardly information available about the architect.

In the booklet provided with the building set, there are references to films of the 1920s. For instance, it claims that the set is suited for the “operating procedures and complete substitution of the largest film sets”. Indeed, some films of that age, like Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, featured megalomanic urban landscapes and monumental skyscrapers. The stories take place among buildings piled atop and next to each other, mountain ranges of cropped and crooked skyscrapers without any open spaces. It is likely that the Ingenius building set was never used for constructing film sets. Rather, it was meant to stimulate children’s creativity and get them to design their own city using their imagination.

The booklet’s illustrations depict children playing in a landscape of miniature skyscrapers. The images remind us of the famous movie King Kong of 1933 where a giant gorilla decimates a city. The children too look like giants, playing among the wooden towers, fantastic buildings and complex bridges. Their every movement threatens the stability of the high-rises. And yet they are the creators of this backdrop, carefully stacking block upon block to create buildings that tower over their heads. To create a city of such dimensions, one would need several thousand building blocks. The Ingenius building set, however, contained barely enough pieces to build the facade of a single skyscraper. In fact, the photos don’t represent the actual game, but rather the dream of reaching ever-higher. The booklet is essentially a manual for building a utopia.