Learning from Lego

As design critic Alexandra Lange reasoned back in 2012, the Lego City line is all masculine sameness: “an urbs founded on the stereotype of boy busyness, a place that makes 3-D the transportation, safety, and sports obsessions writ large on the T-shirts in the boys’ sections of major retailers.” Lego City was built on a militaristic foundation, with law-enforcement sets making up about a third of the entire product suite, from a K-9 unit to an aerial surveillance squad.

That’s what’s so heartening about the Bjarke Ingels Group design for the Lego House: It takes imagination and possibility, qualities that were once practically synonymous with Lego, and injects them into a real-world structure.

Kriston Capps on Lego House at Citylab.

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