AS THE BRICKS CELEBRATE THEIR 65TH ANNIVERSARY, WE’RE CELEBRATING ALL THINGS LEGO. They are so very simple: little plastic bricks that snap into each other, basic enough for a child to enjoy, yet brimming with infinite possibilities. Lego was born on Jan. 28, 1958. That’s when the Danish son of a toymaker raced to the patent office with a marvelous design breakthrough that allowed those tiny bricks to fit snuggly together yet pull easily apart. Those innocuous-looking top studs and bottom tubes, combined with the use of a kind of plastic that was both lightweight and incredibly strong, produced a building block capable of constructing everything from the humblest house to a tower reaching hundreds of feet high. In these pages, explore the many facets of that miraculous brick, whose potential is limited only by the imagination, and see why Lego is so much more than it’s stacked up to be.
