National Building Museum

Adopt an Artifact: Architectural Toy Collection

The National Building Museum is home to the nation’s foremost archive of American architectural and design heritage. The Adopt an Artifact program allows you to directly support the proper care and preservation of objects with critical conservation needs, helping the Museum continue its mission to inspire curiosity about the world we design and build. To support this initiative, click here.

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Program Details

George Wetzel began collecting building toys in the early 1980s, after noticing that the toys he was buying for his children were strikingly different in both material and style from the ones he had played with as a child. Over the next 30 years, he built one of the largest toy collections in the United States, reflecting not only the economic and social dimensions of the American toy industry but also the evolving relationship with architecture and building crafts.

Today, this collection of more than 2,300 toys dating from the 1860s to the 1990s is highly threatened, due to the fragility and light-sensitive nature of its media. The collection contains a variety of different materials, including a wooden toys, stone blocks, metal toys, and early plastic pieces. Almost all of these are stored in crumbling cardboard boxes covered with highly light-sensitive graphics.