Child's play - influence of Friedrich Frobel's kindergarten system, Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture, Columbia University, New York, New York

Art in America, April, 1997 by Norman Brosterman

Because Frank Lloyd Wright is so prominent in American architecture, Frobel blocks, a type of building-block toy fundamental to Wright's youthful development, are widely known to architectural students. Seldom recognized, though, is that these geometric toys, designed by Friedrich Wilhelm Frobel in Germany in the 1840s, were merely a small part of the educational system he invented and called kindergarten. In direct and unprecedented fashion, it was this system that first exposed not only Wright but the likes of Le Corbusier, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Braque to basic geometric forms. Years before the Cubists were born, kindergarten began casting its crystalline spell over Western art.

Kindergarten has been around for so long that it now seems thoroughly familiar to us. But the kindergarten known by most of the generations born in this century is a diluted version of what Frobel originated -- a radical and highly spiritual system of abstract design activities meant to teach children to recognize and appreciate natural harmony. Kindergarten has continued to include singing and dancing as well as the close observation of nature: the growth of plants, the symmetries of crystals and seashells. But long abandoned, and thus hardly known today, is the practical and philosophical heart of the system, the interconnected series of 20 Gifts and Occupations -- exercises involving sticks, colored paper, mosaic tiles and sewing cards as well as building blocks and drawing equipment -- and the gridded tabletops upon which the children composed them. The original kindergarten was still internationally renowned in the 1890s; after its century-long slide into obscurity, Frobel's system and its genesis are worth reexamining.

The names Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Christian Weiss may ring no art-historical bells, yet through the agency of their mutual pupil Frobel, their influence on the development of both art and architecture at the beginning of the 20th century was profound. Pestalozzi was one of the first educators to abandon the standard instructional practice of interminable lectures followed by student recitation in favor of more active, hands-on activities and what he termed Anschauung -- "object lessons," or direct, concrete observation. At the school he opened in Yverdon, Switzerland, in 1804, Pestalozzi's success with orphans and the children of the working class altered the course of modern education. But it was one of his short-lived, experimental failures that changed art.

The traditional educational activity of drawing was greatly emphasized at Yverdon, as Pestalozzi considered it of primary importance in both the teaching of writing and the comprehension of form. Recognizing that children manifested a natural taste for drawing and, just as commonly, an aversion to the study of letters, Pestalozzi developed techniques that combined the two. His assistant Johannes Buss went so far as to construct an experimental lexicon of forms consisting of various segments of lines drawn in the squares of a gridded matrix, which appeared in their joint publication of 1803, ABC der Anschauung.(1) The ABC sought to facilitate children's observation and the learning of writing by fragmenting letters and pictures into their basic components. Unfortunately the system proved inherently confusing, and was short-lived.

Frobel's first visit to Yverdon was in 1805. Two years later, after serving as a private tutor in Frankfurt, he returned to teach under Pestalozzi and stayed until 1810. The son of a Lutheran minister, Frobel was born in Oberweissbach, a forest town in central Germany. A lonely boy with a neglectful stepmother and distracted father, he formed a youthful kinship with nature that blossomed into spiritual exaltation during the height of the Romantic era. The writings of his contemporaries Goethe and Schiller reinforced Frobel's intuited cosmology, and he fashioned a personal philosophy of unity that embraced the spiritual potential within a person, the relations between people in a free society, the place of the individual in relation to the nature that surrounds and includes him, and the life force that controls growth in all things.

In 1814 Frobel took an assistant's job at the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Berlin under Professor Christian Samuel Weiss. Weiss was then in the process of formulating the parameters and techniques of modern crystallography, changing the field from a branch of natural philosophy to an exact mathematical science. It was Weiss's genius to recognize that the number, type and relative direction of a specimen's observable geometric symmetries distinguished its unique internal structure, and could ultimately reveal its specific chemical composition.

Frobel worked each day for almost two years in what he described as a "locked and perfectly quiet room" organizing the diverse and dazzling specimens of the mineralogical museum's omnibus collection.(2) The shapes of crystals in particular -- the systematic variations in the design of their forms, planes and symmetries -- provided an obvious structure for the categorization of mineral classes, ultimately leading to Weiss's discoveries.