Like a lot of new parents, I secretly hope my 6-month-old son, Willie, someday will grow up to be president (he certainly has the right first name). Of course, if that’s not possible, then being the next Frank Lloyd Wright would do just fine.
Willie, however, seems to have set his sights beyond the White House and the Robie House.
He wants to swing a wrecking ball.
The fault is all mine.
Almost every night when I come home from work, my son and I play a game I call “Sears Tower.”
Willie sits in his high chair and I stack little black raisin boxes on the tray in front of him. Up they go, as high as Willie’s chin, then his nose, and finally up above his big blue eyes.
He homes in on them, swings one his arms, then-BLAM!-our imaginary Sears Tower is reduced to smithereens.
I always cheer wildly, hugely proud that my son (who a few months ago could hardly hold his head up straight) has laid waste to this miniature version of the world’s tallest office building.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if I am teaching Willie the wrong lesson-that it is more fun to tear things down than to build them up.
What a relief, then, to learn that I am not the only one who takes a perverse pleasure in watching building blocks fall. The Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal has eased my guilt with its new exhibition, “Toys and the Modernist Tradition.”
The exhibition, which opened Wednesday and appears through May 1, examines how toy manufacturers have been influenced by modern architecture. And as a bonus-for me, anyway-one of the toys mentioned in its catalog essay (but not displayed in the exhibition) shows that there are a lot of us who find delight in demolition.
The out-of-production toy, called the Cleveland Wrecking Game, dates back to the heyday of urban renewal programs in the 1950s and 1960s. It is made of plastic blocks that form a scaled-down version of an old-fashioned, eight-story hotel, complete with boarded-up windows.
The object is to knock down the hotel with the other part of the toy-a replica of a Cleveland Company rotating crane and its height-adjustable wrecking ball.
The instruction sheet of the Cleveland Wrecking Game obviously was written before planners’ utopian dreams of high-rise public housing were turned into living hells.
“Clearing old buildings to make way for new American cities and homes eliminates urban blight and makes our cities better places in which to live,” the sheet says. “You, as the operator . . . can also imagine that you are wrecking old buildings to make way for a new and better country.”
That’s the last lesson I would try to teach my son.
Nonetheless as a father trying to find his way, I was glad to read an observation made by the exhibition’s curator, Howard Shubert, about the Cleveland Wrecking Game.
“While this toy represents a common urban experience,” he writes in the catalog essay, “it also invites us to indulge an aspect of building with blocks that many secretly enjoy.”
See, Willie.
I’m not the only one.
