LEGO Bricks / Classic LEGO

Snap the bricks together and build almost anything! Cars, houses, castles, spaceships - or whatever you can imagine.

There was a time when a big box of LEGO bricks didn't come with instructions telling you what to build. You just dumped them all on the floor, started snapping pieces together, and built whatever your imagination could come up with. A house. A car. A spaceship. A castle. Or something that didn’t even exist - you decided what it was supposed to be.

LEGO began selling plastic building bricks in 1949 under the name Automatic Binding Bricks, but the LEGO brick that we know today really took shape in 1958. That's when LEGO introduced its stud-and-tube design - those familiar bumps on top and tubes (holes) underneath that allow the bricks to snap together tightly but still come apart when you want them to.

As a kid, one of the best things I remember about LEGO was just dumping a big pile of bricks on the floor and building whatever I wanted - like trying to stack them as high as I could without the whole thing crashing down. (As a parent, one of the worst things about those LEGO pieces that my kids dumped out on the floor was stepping on them, barefoot, in the middle of the night!) You didn't need instructions, or even a particular set. Just find the pieces you needed and start building.

LEGO has evolved a lot since then. You can still buy a big box of the basic bricks and build whatever comes to mind, but today's LEGO sets can also be amazingly elaborate. There are cars, buildings, flowers, spaceships, and sets based on everything from Harry Potter to Star Wars.

Some of the larger sets are more like the vintage model car kits I built as a kid - except instead of glue, paint, and molded plastic parts, you're putting the whole thing together one custom LEGO brick at a time, and you end up with a nearly perfect finished product (unlike the model car kits I hurriedly assembled in an afternoon).

That's part of what makes LEGO unusual, and fun for all ages. A preschooler can stack a pile of brightly colored bricks into a "house," while an adult can spend hours building a detailed car or a model with thousands of pieces. The basic idea is still the same: find the right piece, snap it into place, and keep building.