Friedrich Froebel and Frank Lloyd Wright

"Here was something for invention to seize, and use to create."

"The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterward leaves the fingers: so form became feeling."

"Mother learned that Friedrich Froebel taught that children should not be allowed to draw from casual appearances of Nature until they had first mastered the basic forms lying hidden behind appearances. Cosmic, geometric elements were what should first be made visible to the child mind."

"Taken East a the age of three to my father's pastorate near Boston, for several years I sat at the little kindergarten table-top ruled by lines about four inches apart each way making four-inch squares; and among other things, played upon these 'unit lines' with the square (cube), the circle (sphere) and the triangle (tetrahedron or tripod) - these were smooth maple-wood blocks. Scarlet cardboard triangle (60^o-30^o) two inches on the short side, and one side white, were smooth triangular sections with which to come by pattern--design--by my own imagination. Eventually I was to construct designs in other mediums. But the smooth cardboard triangles and maple-wood blocks were most important. All are in my fingers to this day."

"Also German papers, glazed and matte, beautiful soft color qualities, were another one of the 'gifts'--cut into sheets about 12 inches each way, these squares were slitted to be woven into gay colorful checkerings as fancy might dictate. Thus color sense awakened. There were also ingenious 'constructions' to be made with straight, slender, pointed sticks like toothpicks or jack-straws, dried peas for joinings, etc., etc. The virtue of all this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to rhythmic structure in Nature -- giving the child a sense of innate cause-and-effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I learned to 'see' this way and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals to Nature. I wanted to design."

---all quotes by Frank Lloyd Wright

Friedrich Froebel, 1782-1852

• German educator
• the originator of the kindergarten
• worked and studied with the noted Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi
• 1816, founded athe Universal German Educational Institute for children aged 3 to 7
• established in 1837 the first Kindergarten, meaning "children's garden"
• begins training of kindergarten teachers in 1849
• stressed the natural growth of children through play
• kindergartens to be established throughout western Europe, and the US in the 1850's and in Germany and Japan after 1860.

Froebel's Kindergarten

Froebel's Gifts

1. colored balls - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple
2. solid wood sphere, cylinder, and cube with dowels to make them tops and connect them and a gibbet for swinging them
3. wooden cube divided into 8 smaller cubes
4. wooden cube divided into 8 oblong blocks
5. wooden cube divided into 21 smaller cubes, 6 half-cubes and 12 quarter-cubes, an elaboration of gift 3
6. wooden cube divided into 18 oblong blocks, 6 pillars, and 12 squares, an elaboration of gift 4
7. parquetry - flat wood shapes to be arranged on a grid

Froebel's Categories

1. Forms of Knowledge - mathematical and logical ideas such as number, proportion, equivalence and order. These ideas serve to define natural divisions of a gift and to suggest ways of rearranging or transforming these parts.
2. Forms of Life - represent things that can be seen in the outside world .. buildings, house, table, sofa, tree, etc.
3. Forms of Beauty - blocks arranged on a grid without stacking to have some kind of symmetry, to form patterns viewed as ornament

• "Kindergarten Grammars: Designing with Froebel's Building Gifts" by G. Stiny, Enviroment and Planning B, 1980, vol. 7, pp. 409-462.
• Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1997.
• "Froebel, Friedrich,"Microsoft Encarta 98 Encyclopedia, 1993-1997, Microsoft Corporation.