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Coupland builds his own Legoland
 The Super City installation features models of iconic buildings. SPECIAL REPORT
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(CNN) -- As a writer, Douglas Coupland draws on contemporary culture to explore themes such as apathy and alienation -- a formula that has produced nine successful novels since his debut "Generation X" exposed slacker culture in 1991. But now the Canadian author has returned to his original artistic calling as a sculptor to produce an installation for Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture that explores the links between children's building toys such as Lego and the modern urban landscape. "Super City," which is on display until November, creates an imaginary futuristic city that includes models of iconic high-rise buildings such as the former World Trade Center in New York and Toronto's CN Tower interlinked by an infrastructure constructed from the building toys Coupland collected as a child. Coupland's characters are often childish drifters, struggling to cope with the disappointments and responsibilities of adult life. "Super City" is grounded in a nostalgia for Coupland's 1960s childhood when, he says, it seemed that everything in the future would be "white, clean and plastic." "It suggests how the building kits we use as children inform the world view and the artefacts we construct as adults," said Coupland, who argues that building toys have started to influence objects and ideas in the real world. "After many decades of cultural saturation, kits themselves have begun to feed themselves back into the constructed world -- to the point where it's hard to tell where their influence begins and ends." Although a self-confessed Lego addict, Coupland says it was the short-lived but more sophisticated Super City toy from the late 1960s that inspired the work. "It was this utopian building kit," he recalls. "It was a modernist kit -- children could build skyscrapers, research laboratories and pharmaceutical factories. It was a beautifully made system, but it was almost impossible for small fingers to work with, so it died a quick death on the shelves." Coupland says his creative imagination was fired by the modular nature of building kits. While earlier generations had grown up playing with miniaturized versions of whole buildings and objects, he says toys such as Lego and Meccano created a world made up of interchangeable parts and integrated systems -- in which destruction was as much a part of play as construction. Building toys, he believes, also cultivate a capacity to "mold the world we are making, the way we read the world made around us and the way we imagine worlds might be." 
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