“Equipped with imagination alone, the would-be builders were empowered to create, recreate, and dismantle anything—a powerfully modern idea.
When the poet Ezra Pound famously exhorted a generation to ‘make it new,’ he did not mean only once. Rather, modernists set out to shape ever-new artistic forms and styles, pursuing the avant-garde as a way of asserting their autonomy over the established order. Likewise, making it new (over and over and over again) is an inextricable part of Lego’s DNA: just six two-by-four studded pieces can be configured in 915 million ways.”
“The Christiansens did not just revolutionize the toy world; they invented a physical lingua franca for modernism.”