Dandanah
Dandanah is a construction kit with solid blocks made of colored glass . It belongs to the range of reform toys that were widespread in the first decades of the 20th century.
The kit was patented on October 27, 1920 in Germany and a little later also in Austria. It was invented and developed by Blanche Mahlberg and her husband Paul Mahlberg and the architect Bruno Taut . The construction kit is octagonal and contains 62 colored glass building blocks and six template sheets. However, some of these contain building suggestions that would hardly be able to be implemented for reasons of gravity and also do not correspond to the image of the Indian fairy tale palace with which the lid of the box is decorated. Manfred Speidel stated soberly: “The sedate“ village churches ”of the templates do not lead you to the promised fairy tale palace, maybe the glass tower made of colored pillars and cantilevered structure, crowned with red and blue triangular prisms, which anticipates the postmodernism of Michel Graves . In general, the title page is somewhat misleading. Because with the number of bricks in the kit, the extensive "palace" could not be built. "
The kit should come on the market for Christmas 1922. It was probably only produced in a few copies. The glass blocks were produced by Luxfer-Prismen in Berlin-Weißensee . The kit was to be sold through the Bing toy factory in Nuremberg ; however, the labeling of the kits is in English. Apparently, the planned mass production and marketing of the kit did not take place because the Bohemian banking house Fitzgerald in Aussig , which was supposed to finance the production in advance, went bankrupt.
Dandanah means “a bundle of bars” or “a bundle of pillars” in German. Artemis Yagou, however, also assumes a reference to the Dada movement. Due to the material actually unsuitable as children's toys, the building blocks are an exception in the long series of building sets that have ever come onto the market. Manfred Speidel put this in 2006: “Not because of the simple basic shapes: cube, sphere, triangular prism, Elongated cuboid and hexagonal prism, which can be combined to match their size, not because of the color - both features can also be found in other construction sets since Fröbel - but because the colors: red, blue, yellow, green and colorless through the glass Create your own reality in colored lights. If you place the building blocks in such a way that they are penetrated by light, or even better, illuminated from below, they actually exert a peculiar fascination from which you can hardly escape. As far as I know, there is only this one made of glass in the abundance of construction kits. "
Nine copies of the kit seem to have been preserved. One of them, which was manufactured in 1919 and is owned by the Taut family, differs in its design from the later construction sets and does not yet have the name Dandanah . Possibly this is the prototype of the kit. A Dandanah kit has been in the possession of the Deutsches Museum since 1997 , two can be found in the German Toy Museum in Sonneberg , one belongs to the holdings of the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe , one is in the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne , one in the Canadian Center for Architecture and two are part of private collections. A copy that is said to have been in the Stuttgart State Trade Museum has apparently disappeared.
Vitra produced a new edition of Dandanah at the beginning of the 21st century , which Manufactum sold around Christmas 2003 . At the time, Dandanah cost 550 euros. The glass bricks from Vitra are, however, lighter and also differ in terms of touch from the original bricks; In addition, the design of the octagonal construction kit does not correspond to the original.
Web links
- Manfred Speidel : City Crown and Fairy Tale Palace. On the glass building game Dandanah by Bruno Taut , July 2006 ( digital version ).
- Artemis Yagou: Modernist complexity on a small scale: The Dandanah glass building blocks of 1920 from an object-based research perspective , Deutsches Museum, Munich 2013 (= Preprint 6) ( digitized ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Artemis Yagou, Modernist complexity on a small scale: The Dandanah glass building blocks of 1920 from an object-based research perspective , Deutsches Museum 2013 (= Preprint 6), cited below as Yagou 2013, p. 16 f. ( Digitized version ).
- ^ Marion Ackermann: Shining buildings . Hatje Cantz, 2006 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ↑ Yagou 2013, p. 20.
- ↑ Manfred Speidel, City Crown and Fairy Tale Palace. On the glass building game Dandanah by Bruno Taut , July 2006, cited below as Speidel 2006, p. 4 ( digitized version )
- ↑ Yagou 2013, pp. 22 and 32.
- ↑ Yagou 2013, p. 29.
- ↑ Tour through the exhibition at www.deutsches-museum.de
- ↑ Yagou 2013, p. 30.
- ↑ Speidel 2006, p. 1.
- ↑ Speidel 2006, p. 2, describes this dating as arbitrary.
- ↑ Yagou 2013, p. 21 f.
- ↑ Yagou 2013, p. 49.