How To Link Christmas And Structural Engineering? It’s Got To Be Lego

I wonder how many Structural Engineers had their interest sparked about how buildings stand up whilst playing with Lego? For over 70 years now, Lego has been a Christmas Stocking staple, from the plain bricks I remember as a child to the more complex themed designs of today. I’m pleased to say that these days Lego is very much designed with both girls and boys in mind, which it perhaps wasn’t in the 1970s when I was growing up. In those days you could build a house, or a rudimentary car, but not much else (or maybe that was just me?) The potential for more creative and imaginative play had been seen by Godtfred Christiansen, the son of the inventor of Lego, Ole Kirk Christiansen, as early as 1954, but when I was a child Lego kits to make complex structures were still a thing of the future – but how we still loved our primary coloured bricks, sloping roof tiles and wheels.
Lego, whose name derives from the Danish ‘leg godt’ or ‘play well’, started out as wooden bricks, but the premise that they could be taken apart and played with again and again has always been the same. Despite the complex designs now available there is a universal system which has stood the test of time. It was during the 1950s that plastic took over from wood, Duplo for younger children arrived in 1969 and then in the late 70’s mini figures came on the scene. These days the traditional theme of creation lives on, but alongside eight Legoland amusement parks worldwide, movies and video games – it is truly a thread running through our entire culture.
Lego has certainly been a constant in my life – I played with it as a child, it was a staple of home, playgroup and school for my children and even now the excitement of building the Saturn V rocket last Christmas for my 22 year old was heart-warming (although as usual, he had completed it by the end of Boxing Day.) It has encouraged imagination and fostered the questions of how things fit together, how they work and how they don’t fall down – which is, after all, what Structural Engineering is all about.