“What’s that?” Wife asks me.
“Fallingwater.”
“The Frank Lloyd Wright house?”
“Yeah, you don’t see the resemblance?”
“It resembles Fallingwater as much as our shed resembles the Biltmore estate.” Jeez, tough crowd.
I’ll admit it, I’m a bit hurt. But after closer consideration I think you’ll agree that her assertion was correct. An architect I am not.
The little masterpiece you see here was made with a cool product called “CitiBlocs“. When Wife first asked me to try out this product I was skeptical. When I think of wooden blocks for kids, I imagine a bunch of random shapes, maybe an arch here and a triangle there. I opened up the CitiBlocs box and there was nary a half-moon to satisfy my stereotypical block expectations.
After playing with these things for a few minutes, any desire you may have had for an isosceles-triangle shaped chunk of wood will be a distant memory. When you start off with a bunch of odd shapes, a good amount of “creativity” has already been injected by the toy-maker. All you’re doing is stacking some stuff together and calling it a castle. On the other hand, when you have a collection of uniform shapes like the ones provided by CitiBlocs, its completely up to you to make something that looks interesting.
Note that when I talk about “you” or “me”, I’m really talking about our kids. You know, the people who these things are made for. I only made the contraption displayed above for evaluation purposes - yeah that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Remember the set of blocks you had when you were a kid? I bet over time all of the interesting shapes began to disappear. 
Maybe you started out with a bunch of trapezoids and triangles, but after years of usage, dogs chewing on them and other types of egregious mistreatment, your vast collection of pillars and parallelograms probably ended up a sad little set of squares. No such problem with CitiBlocs. You start out with a package of two hundred uniform rectangular pieces. I’m sure your kids will hardly notice if a few end up in the trash or propping up an uneven table.
Here are a few examples of some cool things people have built with this toy. You can find more images on the CitiBlocs site: www.citiblocs.com/media_gallery/our_photos/
You can buy CitiBlocs in packages that range in size from 52 blocks for $15 all the way up to a 1,000 piece set that retails for $295. With that many blocks maybe I could build that model of the Biltmore.
So, go ahead and check out CitiBlocs, I’m sure you’ll (er, I mean your kids) will love them. As for me, I’m not giving up on architecture. As you can see, I’ve managed to create a fine model of the John Hancock building in Boston.
