Vienna's MAK shows 70 pre-Lego construction kits you can touch

A cathedral built from more than 4,000 felt-like blocks cut from recycled PET bottles anchors a new Vienna exhibition of 70 architectural construction kits — and visitors are allowed, even encouraged, to play with them. 'Architectural Construction Kits 1890–1990: Plenty to Play With!' opens on 7 October 2026 at MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts at Stubenring 5, and runs until 14 March 2027. The Deutsches Architekturmuseum presents the show across several MAK rooms, with the kits assembled into finished models.

The exhibition rests on the private collection of graphic designer Claus Krieger. The kits on display date from 1880 to 1960 and span materials including wood, metal, rubber and Galalith, an early bio-plastic.

What can visitors actually do?

'There is a whole world beyond Lego waiting to be discovered,' guest curator Oliver Elser said. 'In our exhibition, you can start playing spontaneously, without having to book in advance. We have eight play stations and a VR installation. You can pick up bricks that look familiar at first glance, only to realise that they are made of rubber. Can you imagine Lego made of rubber?'

Elser notes the unfamiliarity is part of the challenge. 'There are so many lovely building pieces to discover that hardly anyone knows anymore. And that makes building with them quite a challenge. Everyone knows Lego, and everyone knows how to build with it. These kits are different.'

Were these toys for children or adults?

The kits look complex and serious, and Elser admits he wrestled with the question of their intended audience.

'The children on the packaging often look highly concentrated – and not particularly happy. Building can be hard work! The building instructions are usually highly complex. So are these toys really for children, or were the boxes actually aimed more at adults?' Elser asks. 'And yet the packaging and instructions are clearly addressed to children. They are presented as little adults and encouraged to become "little builders" or "little architects". With a few exceptions, girls appear only as bystanders. This changed only gradually from the 1960s onwards.'

Why do so many kits feel frustrating?

Elser points to the sheer scale of the historic industry. Around 900 companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland alone produced this kind of construction toy. 'That is an incredible number,' he said. 'No wonder that not every product behind those boxes was a really well-functioning toy. Quite simply, these were toys that adults had devised for children, within the possibilities and limitations of what were often very small manufacturing companies.'

He adds: 'It is remarkable how [very un-] "educational" these kits often were. Some of the pieces fit together so tightly that playing with them must have been genuinely frustrating.'

How did the museum make fragile kits playable?

Old museum objects normally stay behind glass. To reactivate the historical systems, Elser worked with Professor Andreas Kretzer of Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences (HFT Stuttgart) and his students to build replicas of three building systems.

The largest play station, the Cathedral, stands in MAK's Columned Main Hall. 'We wanted at least one model to be larger than life, so we asked the students what they would build if they had an unlimited supply of building pieces,' Elser said. 'A childhood dream we all probably share.'

The students answered with a substitute material: a recycled substance made from old PET bottles that feels almost like felt. The team cut more than 4,000 pieces. The resulting Cathedral measures 2.6 metres long and 3.2 metres high.

What does the exhibition say about play today?

The show offers a window into childhood across the previous two centuries, but Elser's ambition for the present is straightforward. 'I would love our visitors to leave the exhibition with a smile on their faces. They will have had so many wonderful experiences with their own hands – at a time when museums tend to appeal primarily to our eyes and our brains,' he said.

He adds a wry footnote for anyone tempted to take the hobby home: 'Some of these building pieces are so satisfying to play with that you might want to ask for them for Christmas, if only they weren't out of production.'

With an 18-month run, the exhibition gives MAK one of the longest windows in Europe to test whether hands-on museum design can compete with the brick that dominated everything after it.