From Block Play to Architecture

07/19/2023

From Block Play to Architecture

What kind of people do we want to be? As human as we can be, in support of children being as human as they can be.
Ann Pelo and Margie Carter, From Teaching to Thinking

Considered the ‘father’ of kindergarten, Frederich Froebel (1782-1852) took a wide range of approaches. He promoted finger plays, music and songs to actively engage children. He advocated for outdoor play by creating play festivals. And he created “Froebel’s Gifts” – 16 sets of materials, introduced sequentially, beginning with woolen balls and progressing to increasingly complex blocks. One recipient of Froebel’s Gifts was renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who said, "The maple-wood blocks...are in my fingers to this day." His musings in his autobiography attest to their lasting influence:

"Now came the geometric play of these charming checkered colour combinations! ...The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterwards leaves the fingers: so form became feeling. And the box with a mast to set upon it, on which to hang with string the maple cubes and spheres and triangles, revolving them to discover subordinate forms.

"That early kindergarten experience with the straight line; the flat plane; the square; the triangle; the circle! If I wanted more, the square modified by the triangle gave the hexagon, the circle modified by the straight line would give the octagon. Adding thickness, getting 'sculpture' thereby, the square became the cube, the triangle the tetrahedron, the circle the sphere.

"These primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects... which were ever got into the architecture of the world."

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