A typical British boy of Archigram’s generation, growing up in the 1940s, was apt to play with Meccano, and we might credit to the rivet-and-connector set the same influence upon the formative Archigram architect as was been described to the Froebel blocks at the disposal of Frank Lloyd Wright in kindergarten. Plug-In City deployed a very Meccano-like iconography. Nobel laureate chemist Professor Sir Harry Kroto—of the same generation as Archigram’s members and sharing their passion for graphic design and Buckminster Fuller Geodetics—has drawn a correlation between the decline in British engineering and the decline in Meccano, arguing that LEGO, which supplanted Meccano as a toy, produces less didactic structures.
— Simon Sadler. “New Babylon versus Plug-in City,” Exit Utopia.
