Kenner Girder and Panel Set and Mies...  

I was just looking at my new Dwell and they have some pics of Mies early work in USA.

Looking at it, I suddenly realized why his work has always seemed so familiar to me, where as Gropius' and Breuer', two other architects featured in the story with Mies, always seems so much less so.

For Christmas in about 1962-64, I asked for and received a Kenner Girder and Panel set. It consisted of a green board with a grid of holes in it, plus a bunch of reddish plastic I-beam girders and plastic panels. One erected the frame of a building and then affixed the thin plastic panels to the girders. One could erect a building, tear it down, and rebuild something else, again and again. I loved it and played endlessly with it.

To my amazement, the thin plastic panels looked just like Mies' two story buildings in Detroit's Lafayette Park complex.

I don't ever recall Mies' name being on the Kenner Girder and Panel set from my childhood, but it surely was an emulation of his work.

I sure wish some contemporary toy makers would reissue a series of Kenner Girder and Panel sets with a different set for each great designer of that era, and then for some of the great ones working today.

I absolutely loved building with that set and found all the other more traditional block sets of the time, and even the Lego sets of today, kind of sophomoric in comparison. Building a frame structure and affixing a skin to it was so much more INTERESTING to me as a child than building with blocks only! Who knows? Maybe Lego could be talked into combining girder frames with Lego blocks just the same way someone like Breuer combined stone and steel (at least metal casement).

It only took me about 48 years to recall this. 🙂