Anchor Stone Victorian Manor
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a little show on titled Classic/Fantastic: Selections from the Modern Design Collection. In it is the most amazing set of travertine building blocks designed by the husband/wife team, Lella and Massimo Vignelli and titled Metafora #2 Block Set. So elemental, so beautiful and if they were in a kid’s hand and not a display case, I bet, so much fun. It got me thinking, what IS out there for aspiring architects or just toddlers wanting to stack, knock over, and play with different shapes. Enter constructiontoys.com which has just closed its store in Massachusetts after 10 years and is having a massive web sale.
They have Anchor Stones, which have a history dating back to 1880 in Germany when the company was first founded. The blocks, made of pressed ground quartz, chalk and linseed oil come in three colors meant to imitate the red brick, yellow limestone and blue slate found in European building. You can make Baroque palaces, Moroccan minarets, Gothic churches or anything you please with these precisely pressed stones. Expensive but they are built to last. I know someone whose kids are playing with their grandfather’s sets.
-by liz
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