Close-Up View of Froebel’S Kindergarten with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Drawing Table

By Wally Rogers

Unparalleled account of two astute thinkers German Friedrich Froebel and American Frank Lloyd Wright about an intertwined connection between a captivating school-master and a tenacious master-architect.
An in-depth examination of how children learn coupled with what Wright learned in Froebels Kindergarten and how he applied it at the drawing table. Appropriate for parents, caretakers and educators of children and young people up through college age; and academic scholars and avid practitioners who advocate for the preservation of Wrights legacy.
Narrative transcends years of commonplace thinking and practices founded upon an unrivaled method that accurately led to patterns of lovely shapes and magnificent angles, the bedrock of Froebels historical kindergarten and Wrights timeless architecture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781503581807

Wally Rogers

Teacher, trainer, facilitator and consultant for 40 years in elementary and junior-senior high school classrooms; and, university, industry and school administration positions. For 20 years, interpreter and director of education at one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s finest Usonian homes; and, for 15 years director of research for Froebel’s Kindergarten studies. Dr. Rogers conducted scores of workshops and lessons on the workings of Froebel’s Kindergarten that enabled hundreds of children and adults, individually and in groups, to gain proficiency over brief periods of time, with authentic instruction and inexpensive training materials.

Book preview

Close-Up View of

Froebel’s Kindergarten

with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Drawing Table

Wally Rogers

Copyright © 2016 by Wallace J. Rogers, Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015910299

ISBN:      Hardcover   978-1-5035-8181-4

                Softcover     978-1-5035-8182-1

                eBook         978-1-5035-8180-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Part 1 Introduction

Chapter 1 Lloyd-Jones Family—Adding Beauty To Beauty

Chapter 2 Master Architect − Schoolmaster

Chapter 3 Froebel’s Kindergarten Gifts And Kindergarten Occupations

Chapter 4 Nature, Knowledge, And Beauty Forms

Part 2 Kindergarten Gifts

Chapter 5 Goals Of Kindergarten Gifts

Chapter 6 Solids—The Ball, Cube, Cylinder And Sphere, And Small And Large Divided Cubes

Chapter 7 Planes — Parquet Tiles

Chapter 8 Lines—Jointed Slats, Slat Interlacing, Stick Laying, Ring Laying, And Thread

Chapter 9 Points—Dots

Part 3 Kindergarten Occupations

Chapter 10 Goals Of Kindergarten Occupations

Chapter 11 Points —Perforating

Chapter 12 Lines —Sewing, Drawing, Coloring, And Paper Interlacing

Chapter 13 Planes —Paper Mat Weaving, Paper Folding, And Paper Cutting

Chapter 14 Solids —Pea Work, Cardboard Modeling And Modeling Clay

Part 4 Unity

Chapter 15 Discovery

Chapter 16 Invention

Part 5 Beautiful Buildings

Chapter 17 Samara

Chapter 18 Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church

Chapter 19 Nakoma

Part 6 Transformation Of Beauty Forms

Chapter 20 Solids

Chapter 21 Planes

Chapter 22 Lines

Chapter 23 Points

Part 7 Lovely Shapes And Magnificent Angles

Chapter 24 Solids, Planes, Lines, And Points

Chapter 25 Points, Lines, Planes, And Solids

Part 8 Point Counterpoint

Chapter 26 Academic Scholars

Chapter 27 Avid Practitioners

Part 9 Closing Commentary

Acknowledgments

References

Think simple as my old master used to say -

meaning reduce the whole of its parts

into the simplest terms,

getting back to first principles.

– Frank Lloyd Wright

Play is the highest expression of human

development in childhood for it alone

is the free expression of what is in a child’s soul.

– Friederich Froebel

FOREWORD

F rank Lloyd Wright, the grand master of geometric form, discovered as a child in Froebel’s Kindergarten a design method that lasted him a lifetime. As a result, in several drafting studios, throughout his career, the world’s best-known architect designed beautiful buildings, household furnishings, glass art windows, light fixtures, gardens, landscapes, and graphic illustrations, each appearing as fine works of art.

Frank Lloyd Wright at the Drawing Table

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Wisconsin Historic Society Image ID.87749

Unparalleled in detail and pattern, the crafty architect captured the essence of the natural world—in architectural studies—discovered by careful observations of lovely shapes and magnificent angles sought out and revealed in primordial geometric forms.

Wright recognized, during child play and later as an accomplished architect, exquisite qualities of geometric solids, planes, lines, and points, teasing them apart and combining them together, that is, design elements, into architectural renderings. By consistently reconfiguring points and lines into planes and solids, and vice versa, he produced dramatic effects in designs for light screens, furniture, fireplaces, lighting fixtures, facades, ornaments, textiles, floor plans, and magazine covers, to name just a few.

Never at a loss for innovative ideas, Wright always applied novel solutions to everyday problems associated with residential living, religious ceremonies, and business practices. The genius architect showed exceptional talent, being equally adept at designing constructions for many different functions, for instance, amusement parks, theaters, private homes, civic centers, entertainment facilities, college campuses, auditoriums, hotels, medical offices, gasoline stations, jails, churches, and shops.

Working on square and triangular grids initially instructed at his mother’s side, Wright created on the drafting-table design patterns out of geometric forms specified in exercises devised by Friedrich Froebel, the eminent father of German Kindergarten. Like a youngster in the original Kindergarten, Wright played at a grid-top table with blocks, tiles, paper strips, sticks, rings, wires, and seeds and grasped the pureness of geometric shapes, which led continually and endlessly to the development of beauty forms throughout his architectural career.

Young Boy at Kindergarten Table

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E. Steiger and Co. Catalogue (1876)

While performing countless practice and open-ended manipulative exercises in Froebel’s Kindergarten, Wright discovered a way to see nature revealed through diverse arrangements of geometric elements all pleasing to the eye. Perforating, sewing, drawing, coloring, paper interlacing, paper-mat weaving, paper folding, paper cutting, pea work, and perhaps even cardboard and clay modeling provided favorable circumstances for him to see beauty in nature and accordingly permitted him to create a divine form of architecture.

Contrary to what most people know about Froebel’s German Kindergarten, the complete lineup consists of an extensive set of twenty-four Gifts and Occupations, which operate together in child’s play for the utmost development of mind-eye-hand coordination. In every Froebel exercise, participants are taught to see, to do, and to tell in a course of instruction appropriate for children of all ages—infancy through teenage years.

The research project that cumulated in the publication of this book lays open Wright’s version of Froebel’s Kindergarten in the same manner that German Kindergarten was experienced by the world’s most renowned architect, effectively demonstrated in America at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876. His mother, Anna, visited the exposition when Wright was nine years old and began instructing him in the fine distinction of Froebel’s Kindergarten, a revolutionary system of education appropriate for all children, regardless of individual interest, ability, or age.

Traditionally, academic scholars and avid practitioners of Wright’s architecture, in considering possible influences on his life and work, accept unjustifiably and often promulgate erroneously the opinion that Froebel’s Kindergarten is suitable only for preschool age children up to seven years old.

Caught up in the snare of American-style kindergarten, which is targeted for five-year-old children, most researchers and authors simply do not fathom the enormous potential of German Kindergarten, appropriate for Wright who as a nine- and ten-year-old had not exceeded, in any respect or degree, the ordinary age for such an extraordinary learning experience.

Close-Up View of Froebel’s Kindergarten with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Drawing Table, as a research project, was conducted and, as a book, was written to help enlighten people who have not seriously explored or understood Froebel’s Kindergarten as it existed at the time that Wright contemplated such a rich and highly efficient educational process, profoundly molding his thinking and architectural development. Adapted from the pioneer work carried out by Froebel’s Kindergarten advocates Maria Kraus-Boelte and John Kraus, more than 2,500 unblemished learning exercises are presented along with sufficient descriptions of teaching materials and instructions for their use.

Wright’s lifelong work rests on the foundation of Froebel’s Kindergarten, which clearly demonstrates its usefulness and intellectual bearing on his life as a professional architect. Exemplary achievements beginning with the architect’s early training, development under Louis Sullivan, experimentation during the Prairie and Usonian periods, and visions for the future provide a unique composite of lessons attributable to Froebel’s Kindergarten. The account begins with its prominence in his life as a young lad in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and culminates in his thought-provoking work, which together spanned more than eight decades of personal achievement.

While performing Friedrich Froebel’s training exercises—inspired by acts of discovery and invention—Wright wanted to design in accordance with nature, similar in structure to crystals that occur in the form of beautiful geometric shapes and patterns, fabricated in German Kindergarten. Wright’s body of work reflects foremost work of an artist, while employing but a handful of basic shapes and angles of two-dimensional figures and three-dimensional bodies.

Notably, Wright was among the first generation of American children to be trained in German Kindergarten and benefited more than anyone else did by far, as judged by his architectural masterpieces. Analyzing samples of his work leaves absolutely no doubt about the proficiency of his studies in the original German Kindergarten and the scholarly influence that it had on his life’s work.

Wright, arguably the world’s greatest kindergarten student, gained international fame and recognition during his lifetime. His popularity has grown steadily ever since based on established methods that survived the test of time, first conceived as a provocative design method that he became skilled at in Froebel’s Kindergarten. As an aspiring architect, young Wright, encouraged by a dedicated mother, set out on a journey destined to design and build beautiful buildings, fearlessly challenging the development of classical, European-influenced architecture, for a new America.

Known for its innovative approach to human knowledge, German Kindergarten, with unlimited learning exercises and assignments accomplished through the interplay of Froebel’s Gifts and Occupations, provide the impetus for detailed studies of a truly American form of architecture. Thus, to see Wright’s body of work is to see Froebel’s Kindergarten in action, and to see Froebel’s Kindergarten in action is to see Wright’s body of work.

The disquisition tells the story of the journey of a grandson of Mary Lloyd and Richard Jones, starting in the fields and woods of Wisconsin and ending in landscapes shaped by the plains, deserts, mountains, rivers, and coastal regions of North America and beyond. The imaginative writing unfolds with the vision of a loving mother, Anna Lloyd-Jones, a student of nature and a countryside teacher, to the making of an architect and his legacy, continuing from this time forward in the built plans and visionary projects of America’s most decorated architect.

Above all else, the research findings reaffirm Froebel’s German Kindergarten as an effective, fun-loving experience for children of all ages, as attested by hundreds of kids. To them as well as their parents and teachers, I am most grateful for the learning experiences we have shared together—without them, this research project and publication could not have happened.

While a wide variety of architectural accomplishments by Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrate the uniqueness of Froebel’s approach to human learning, clearly by choice the content of the book relies upon knowledge and insight into the manner that Froebel’s Kindergarten operates.

Therefore, the contents foremost provide a close-up view of German Kindergarten as it existed during the latter part of the nineteenth century, at a time when a young boy’s life was forever changed. Like Frank Lloyd Wright and his mother, parents and children of today during the early years of the twenty-first century can experience the same joys of child play, available to all families who call America home.

Wallace J. Rogers

West Lafayette, Indiana

December 30, 2015

PREFACE

F riedrich Froebel proclaimed a compelling educational system unprecedented for teaching children and named the system Kindergarten , which in English means children’s garden. Similar in aim to caring for a flower or vegetable garden, the purpose of the original German Kindergarten was to nurture the growth and development of children. Froebel’s Kindergarten, consisting of a balanced curriculum for academic and vocational studies, is made up of twenty-four different kinds of playthings, with each one mirroring essential qualities of geometric forms, organized and presented according to geometric methods and principles—that is to say, in the form of solids, planes, lines, and points.

Picture a young girl with concentration and thought, lovely designs shaped by her fingers with her eyes focused on simple square tiles, shortly transformed into beautiful patterns that fascinate the mind. The child is left to ponder the wonder of her creation—often surprised yet always delighted by the outcome.

Friedrich Froebel

Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782–1852) as a young boy studied nature near his uncle’s home and as a woodsman in the Thuringian Forest possessed a special knack for collecting, drying, and classifying life forms—in fact, most anything that the local flora had to offer. Later, spending time with his brother at the university in Jena, Froebel’s studies included mathematics, mineralogy, geometry, chemistry, house building, architecture, land surveying, and topographical drawing.

Froebel and Nature

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Letting go of a short-lived dream for becoming a practicing architect, Froebel settled on a career in education, accepting a teaching position at the Frankfurt Model School in 1805, with its founder a protégé of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), a believer in hands-on learning for children of all ages. Schooled in new theories and philosophies of modern education, Froebel focused attention on the strengths and capabilities of youth—from birth up to age twenty.

Tutoring three young brothers (nephews), on land set aside for a garden by their parents, Froebel raised flowers and other plants, which apparently reminded him of his own childhood experiences of direct observation and interactions with nature. Following the tenets of Pestalozzi’s theories and practices, Froebel adhered to four pedagogic principles for teaching children:

► Meaningful human activity must be self-generated.

► Number, form, and language are fundamental sources of all learning.

► Active engagement must be included in daily coursework.

► Trust and love are manifested between mother and child.

Encouraged by the steadfast principles and teachings of Pestalozzi, Froebel recognized the importance of form over words, in which shapes and patterns take precedence over calling something by its actual name, leaving children to ultimately create learning through the language of geometric form.

With vocabulary building coming later during cognitive development, young children in particular were allowed freedom of representation through the manipulation of concrete objects leading ultimately to abstract thinking, reasoning, inspiration, and self-expression.

By 1811, Froebel, at age twenty-nine, immersed himself in studies of physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and natural history, swayed at the time by precepts of atomic theory, embracing the idea that tiny particles in different combinations compose all matter. Froebel, in 1814, assumed the position of assistant at the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Berlin, a post made available to him under Prof. Christian Samuel Weiss.

Professor Weiss had been analyzing experimental data and results that suggested that naturally occurring forms of crystals manifest on their exterior surfaces peculiar internal arrangements of minute particles, which could be represented and studied in three-dimension grids. The professor believed that a specimen’s observable symmetries arose from unique internal structure, which in the end would reveal a corresponding chemical composition.

External Appearance of Crystal Structure

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Courtesy of www.clipart.com

Geometric analysis unlocked the secrets of crystallite growth and development known primarily through precise patterns of form, enabling Froebel to study and classify mineral collections according to number of axes, faces, and edges, a classification system still used today to identify unknown samples. Working with beautiful specimens of gems and minerals, Froebel saw in the shapes of crystals certain laws of nature, which carried over, in his mind, to the systematic growth and development of children from birth to adulthood.

Sets of wooden models of that period underscore the value of crystallite studies in the field of science and the importance placed in the classification of minerals, based upon surface features.

Crystal Models and Classification

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Virtual Museum of the History of Mineralogy (mineralogy.eu)

Out of such knowledge, theories of atomic structure emerged ushering in new fields of study in chemistry and physics.

Combinations of triangles, squares, rectangles, prisms, tetrahedrons, and cubes were used to explain the formation of crystallite structures and, similarly, according to Froebel, account for the growth and development of living things. Froebel concluded that children would benefit from handling such geometric objects capable of transforming them into meaningful learning by creating knowledge, nature, and beauty forms.

In 1816, Froebel founded a school for children, the Universal German Educational Institute at Griesheim and later at Keilhau, where he diligently spent time teaching. By publishing ideas to promote a new kind of education, at age forty-four, Froebel published The Education of Man (1826), which contains the majority of the Gifts and Occupations that would become the foundation for the Kindergarten that bears his name, essentially the one experienced by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Froebel deciphered human learning in accordance with the law of contrasts in the development of knowledge, particularly concepts of rest and motion, which he attributed in learning to the human senses, primarily sight, hearing, and touch. Thus, the development of these senses in children enabled parents and teachers to establish in them a most intimate union between objects and their opposites, words and symbols, connecting them into one.

Play and speech constitute the element in which the child lives, therefore imparting on objects everything that he imagines representing his inner being outwardly imputing the same activity to all about him. Thus, in German Kindergarten, Froebel opened to the outside world of children the inner nature of the human spirit, through child play, which was considered as the highest phase of human development.

About the same time, Froebel drew up plans for other schools, which spread outside Germany to Switzerland, establishing educational institutions for an orphanage and a normal school. Teaching methods were formalized for the training of prospective teachers, using his ideas for the development of interests, while adhering to coordinated instructions and materials.

In 1837, Froebel returned to Thuringia where he opened another school for early childhood education, differentiating it from previous asylums for infants; and two years later, he coined the term kindergarten. In 1840, he opened the Universal German Kindergarten at Blankenburg where he engaged women in the teaching of children, which guaranteed him a steady source of kindergartners, a designation he gave to those who taught kindergarten children.

Accordingly, by 1851, Froebel and a barrage of kindergartners had started several training schools as well as Kindergartens in Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, and Gotha. Opposed by Prussian government authorities, Froebel’s dream for the free republic of childhood was prohibited for a number of years, even though after the founder’s death in 1852, German Kindergarten flourished during the 1860s and continued to spread worldwide.

The Kindergarten Guides

The Kindergarten Guide, Volume One: The Gifts and The Kindergarten Guide, Volume Two: The Occupations were simultaneously published in English as an illustrated handbook for the self-instruction of kindergartners, mothers, and nurses. Today the Kindergarten Guides, authored by Maria Kraus-Boelte and John Kraus (1877), are equally useful to parents, teachers, and caretakers of children regardless of a child’s aptitude, eco-sociological condition, or age.

German Kindergarten Guide

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The Guides resulted from twenty-five years of experience by the authors in the Kindergarten, in Germany, England, and America, and were published in response to requests for detailed information, which previously had been very generally available, limited to small pamphlets of individual lessons and lectures.

Inquiries made to the authors from mothers asking for advice; school principals wondering to what extent Froebel’s Occupations might be introduced into the schools; and finally, many people, superficially or imperfectly trained as teachers in so-called kindergartens, becoming dissatisfied with their preparation led to the publication of both Guides. Specifically, according to the authors, people desired a means of obtaining, by the aid of some book on the subject, a better understanding of kindergarten instruction based upon the teachings and methods of Froebel himself.

Bear in mind that, by design, Froebel intended to create a system of educational child development that should start earlier than and continue beyond the instruction of five-year-old children. His labors, therefore, were not confined to the kindergarten alone, which was but one of the several features of his new and peculiar system. To this end, the authors of the Guides make clear and categorically state:

The benefit of Froebel’s educational idea will completely be appreciated only, when it shall have been applied to every stage of educational progress—when, in fact, the kindergarten is considered but the preparation for a higher education based upon the same fundamental principle; a system which will permit each pupil to manifest his own individuality freely and without restraint, and allow the fullest scope to his talents, tastes, and tendencies. (The Kindergarten Guide, Volume One: The Gifts, p. v)

The authors say expressly that nothing short of thorough understanding of the system and its philosophy, nothing less than the attainment of a certain manual dexterity, and a practical knowledge acquired by going through a full course of instruction are, in addition to natural aptitude, necessary for a person who desires to become a successful kindergartner.

Mental abilities developed while preparing for and carrying out geometric exercises during child play automatically turn regular and mundane activities into exciting and enlightening learning experiences, which have immediate impact on the original thought and creativity of children. In Froebel’s Kindergarten, playing with an assortment of objects, children routinely create stories, making them come alive and seem real, even though most often the stories are imaginary.

Telling stories improves children’s conversation and listening skills and develops their facilities to think logically and organize ideas in rational ways. Froebel’s Kindergarten extends in children the power to depict, replicate, illustrate, practice, and gain new insight into the fundamental truths about geometry as a design tool, mastered by completing learning exercises on grid paper, sequentially reconfiguring points, lines, planes, and solids into many different and useful design forms and patterns.

Child at Play

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E. Steiger and Co. Catalogue (1876)

Kindergarten Supplies

In America, Froebel’s Kindergarten publications, supply house catalogues, and training manuals that appeared later than 1878 probably had little or no intellectual influence on the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Milton Bradley Company, an American outlet in Springfield, Massachusetts, and E. Steiger & Co., an American distributor of books and supplies in New York City, stocked, advertised, and marketed lines of Froebel’s Gifts and Occupations around the time that Anna Lloyd-Wright visited America’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (1876).

When considering the importance of Froebel’s Kindergarten and its outcome on Wright, it only makes sense to recognize those resources readily available at the time that Wright studied Froebel’s methods with his mother. Later than the year 1878, references pertaining to the establishment, conduct, and performance of kindergarten programs in America, by and large, distort the reality of Wright’s German Kindergarten experiences. This is to say that during the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, public and private schools in America adopted a different approach to kindergarten instruction, making it exclusively a program for preschool children up to five years of age.

Therefore, the proper frame of reference to discern the influence that Froebel’s Kindergarten had on Wright depends upon knowing full well the facts about the training methods and materials put to use by Wright’s mother. The sole known source of Froebel’s Kindergarten training methods and supplies purchased by Anna Wright were from E. Steiger & Co. after observing classes at the Women’s Pavilion (1876).

Integrated Chapters

Generally, the story line runs sequentially as delineated in the contents page, with each area of study concurring with sequences of instructions provided in the Kindergarten Guides by Maria Kraus-Boelte and John Kraus, first published in two volumes by E. Steiger & Co. in 1877.

The Kindergarten Guides, reprinted under two separate covers, are highly recommended for reading and reference, to understand Froebel’s Kindergarten and in the completion of key exercises throughout the book, and as applicable in the Guides. In this way, readers can experience authentic German Kindergarten as developed in America in its most original and complete form.

All practice exercises illustrated and elaborated upon in each part and chapter of the book are cross-indexed by page and exercise numbers to the Kindergarten Guides for citation and quick location of directions to carry out related (referenced) and supportive practice exercises and learning.

For practical reasons, the limited number of exercises selected for inclusion in the book corresponds to those exercises believed to have had significance on Wright’s architectural work, brought into play to demonstrate associations between Froebelian and Wrightian concepts and design methods.

With that in mind, readers are strongly encouraged to secure sets of the Kindergarten Guides, The Gifts and The Occupations, which can be purchased through preferred suppliers. In addition, a copy of The Kindergarten Guide, Volume One: The Gifts is available and can be downloaded from several sources on the World Wide Web. In studies of Froebel’s Kindergarten, in conjunction with the research, writing, and completion of the book, the vast majority of practical materials for the Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations were constructed by hand (homemade) by the author, although sets of several Gifts were purchased for ready use.

Nevertheless, all information for investigating Froebel’s Kindergarten and for the construction of the hands-on material came from the Guides, which by and large provide descriptions for purpose, function, and fabrication. Furthermore, all exercises conducted by the author were documented, including detailed notes and photographic images of the completed work, often including work in progress.

Many exercises were conducted with groups and individuals in school, home, library, and museum settings in which folks of all ages were instructed and observed practicing exercises making use of different types of Gifts and Occupations, particularly block play, parquet tile work, paper interlacing, paper folding, paper cutting and mounting, box making, and clay modeling over the past ten years.

For the most part, the photographs are original to the author indicative of the many hours of ongoing studies in connection with children and a broad sample of numerous completed exercises, those created by children, parents, teachers, and the author alike.

The culmination of this research and development project, with fifteen years of investigation, depended upon insights gained by conducting several thousand manipulative exercises, with veritable meaning and understanding coming about only by successfully carrying out exercises of every sort—from among the thirteen Kindergarten Gifts and eleven Kindergarten Occupations.

PART 1

Introduction

T he journey of an immigrant Welsh family in 1837 led prophetically to Frank Lloyd Wright as the world’s greatest architect—an architect imbued in Nature and its divine beauty. As a youngster under the tutelage of his ambitious-minded mother, Wright learned the virtue of adding beauty to beauty and adding it again during an unparalleled seven-decade venture in architectural art and design.

Friedrich Froebel, late in his life after years of research and investigation, invented German Kindergarten as a system of learning for children of all ages from infancy through adulthood. Anna Wright acquired instructional materials and study guides appropriate for use in the home and set out to educate her genius son as a prelude to him becoming an expert architect capable of designing beautiful buildings.

From the earliest classroom assignments at the University of Wisconsin and projects in Chicago offices of Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Louis Sullivan, Wright touched on a lovely geometrical approach to simplifying ornamental design. Incorporating Froebel’s geometric principles into a new vision for American architecture, Wright became readily known for building designs that shared the stage with the plenteous beauty of Nature.

Froebel’s Kindergarten (1876) consisted of a series of twenty-four Gifts and Occupations provided to children in a systematic and logical manner mimicking the geometric forms of naturally occurring crystals. Children, who are directed to create nature, knowledge, and beauty forms, investigate geometric points, lines, planes, and solids of precise shapes, angles, sizes, and proportions.

Throughout bona fide German Kindergarten studies, children are challenged to think about and act on the Gifts (discovery) and Occupations (invention), resulting in different but genuinely related geometric perspectives for creating flat figures and solid bodies. Wright, having mastered the workings of Froebel’s Kindergarten, applied the same systematic approach to his highly successful yet often contentious architectural practice.

Returning home from America’s Centennial Exposition (1876), Anna Wright prepared herself and provided her young son age nine with a learning regimen requiring the use of higher level intellectual capabilities. The education process embodied the development of the whole child, continuously striving for self-motivation, freshness, originality, and critical analysis.

Following in the footsteps of pioneering teachers and the formulation of a new education system in America, Anna, with her son and two younger daughters, latched onto a creative and novel line of attack to human learning, aimed at nourishing individuality and thoughtful learning. In its purest tradition, Froebel’s Kindergarten presented to children things before words and ideas before names by educating them to observe, perform, and inform.

Scrutinizing weeds in fields of a Midwestern prairie, Wright as a teenage boy decided to do something about his family’s faith in God, living long after to tell his personal story about Nature and its bountiful beauty. He traced a personal journey back to Nature on the Lloyd-Jones farmland in Wisconsin and to the Kindergarten grid-top table where he played with toys originating in the countryside of Germany.

Out of his imaginative mind streamed beautiful designs overflowing onto every conceivable landscape like cascading waters carving indelible marks on the earth’s terrain. Adapting his architectural work to features of natural beauty, Wright worked with simple materials—wood, masonry, glass, copper, concrete, and steel—always minimizing quantity and maximizing use, while exploiting the physical properties of materials, well beyond ordinary limits accepted by other architects around the world.

The Introduction (Part 1) tells a gripping story about a man and his journey to become, in his own words, the world’s greatest architect—a story worth telling and retelling again. Divided into four chapters, the story begins with Lloyd-Jones Family—Adding Beauty to Beauty, followed by Master Architect— Schoolmaster, then Kindergarten Gifts and Kindergarten Occupations, and finally the realization of Froebel’s Kindergarten—Nature, Knowledge, and Beauty Forms.

CHAPTER 1

Lloyd-Jones Family—Adding Beauty to Beauty

A generation before Frank Lloyd Wright was born, Anna Lloyd-Jones, daughter of Mary Lloyd and Richard Jones, was a teacher inspired by her passion for education and love of beauty. With her parents and three siblings, Anna at age five immigrated to America from Wales. Six years passed before the family settled in the valley by the Wisconsin River. At age eleven, Anna started a journey in the hills and woods of the Wisconsin prairie, first as a willing worker learning to add tired to tired and adding it again, something her Unitarian father preached and diligently taught her, and later as a countryside teacher.

Family Dedication

Anna crisscrossed the land on horseback and by foot building a fine reputation as a teacher of children and along the way recognized nature’s beauty in the woods and meadows stretching from hilltop to hilltop. She knew the trails and landscape exceptionally well with its lovely ferns, flowers, berries, and wildlife flourishing there among gentle flowing streams, ledges of rock, and blazing colors.

Nature and Wisconsin Landscape

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Courtesy of www.goodfreephotos.com

Anna Lloyd-Jones’s dedication to teaching, appreciation of nature, and love of beauty eventually led to marriage at age twenty-nine to a William Russell Cary Wright, a self-taught musician seventeen years her senior. The union produced three children, the eldest, Frank, and two daughters, Maginel and Jane, who were adored by Anna perhaps at the expense of the father.

Within three years, William Wright turned to preaching and moved to Weymouth, Massachusetts, near Boston with a three-year-old boy, a new infant daughter, and an education-minded wife, Anna. Taught in public schools and at home, soon the young boy realized the power of the imaginative vision possessed by his devoted mother. Imbued with the physical beauty of nature and art, Anna continued in her journey with the son by her side who would in time, as she envisioned, design exquisite accommodations for interested families, religious congregations, and successful businesses.

Not until the Wright family returned to Madison did young Frank get to know firsthand about the valley near Spring Green that was cherished by his mother and other ancestors of Lloyd-Jones kin. The boy shunned social activities, preferring instead to read and think alone in his loft bedroom and dream about a future filled with the loveliness of nature poetically expressed through architecture and music. Soon the dedicated mother’s entire family reinforced Anna’s ambitious plans for her genius son.

With father playing at the organ, the youngster listened to Bach and Beethoven experiencing symphonies and harmonies, that is, forms of beauty to his ear. At age eleven, beautiful music replicated the geometric beauty of Froebel’s Kindergarten introduced to him a few years earlier at age nine by his mother in Weymouth. However, Wright’s real education would commence on the Lloyd-Jones farm during the summer months of the late 1870s and early 1880s when he lived in Madison raised by a caring mother whose languished husband left the home in desperation—according to Wright at her request.

Alone with her children, Anna stayed the course in her journey later taken up by her son on nearby land owned by her father—the son’s grandfather—Richard Lloyd-Jones, the land someday he would call home. Cast in the shadows of the woods, brightly sunlit meadows, and golden-colored hayfields on the farm, Wright through his early teenage years feverishly explored beauty in its most natural forms—the same beauty, which his mother as a young girl was enthralled by, found in the veins of leaves, rosettes of berries, petals of flowers, blades of grass, wings of birds, and rocky ledges that served the architect for a lifetime.

God-Inspired Learning

In the prelude to Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography, Wright recounted a lesson from his Uncle John on the Lloyd-Jones farm during a walk on a light blanket of snow over sloping fields, gleaming in the early morning sunshine. With his uncle walking hand in hand with the boy in a straight line, the purpose of the walk together was to demonstrate, by looking back on their footprints in the snow, the importance of staying on the straight and narrow, always obeying the righteousness of God’s will.

Breaking loose from his uncle’s grip, Wright had different ideas, zigzagging back and forth across his uncle’s prints in the snow, collecting flowers, weeds, and hay into his arms. Finally upon rejoining his uncle at the top of the hill, the lesson would come—the way of the Lord is straight, neither to the left nor to the right. Looking at the armful of Nature’s beauty forms, Wright knew at that moment that Uncle John had missed something important in his compelling story of God.

Apparently, Uncle John’s nephew had expressed something on the walk that the elder and wiser Welsh family members never knew, except, of course, his mother, Anna, who loved natural beauty. Grandfather Lloyd-Jones preached Isaiah to his children, and Uncle John was bent on cautioning his young nephew on the virtues of faith in flowers fading and grasses withering but recognizing the word of God enduring forever.

Heaped in his arms, Wright witnessed God within the beautiful weeds gathered from Nature, created by the same loving God known to Isaiah, and preached by his Welsh grandfather and Uncle John. On that sunny wintry morning, Wright uttered something of great consequence beyond the lesson given by his uncle, a lesson that seemed to escape the older man—flowers and grasses too speak of the word of God.

Looking back on their tracks, the man and the boy observed vacillating and baffling lines of footprints superimposed upon a single straight line of marks in the snow. Wright, as a practicing architect, bared the full Lloyd-Jones story, graphically using a special geometric language of points, lines, and planes depicting his unfolding story. Wright’s drawing, titled "From Generation to Generation," is that of a preliminary study for the cover of "Book One: Family," a section of Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography.

Illustrated in the form of a line drawing by the author, the overall pattern is the architect’s view of family life on the prairie that Wright experienced, enjoining shapes and angles pinpointing the way he viewed Froebel’s Kindergarten, at a very young age, as fundamental elements of artistic design.

The fact that Wright expressed his impressions of the walk with his uncle in terms of shapes and angles commonly found in studies of geometric forms reveals the architect’s faithful reliance on Froebel and his manner of seeing nature and happenings in life graphically as lovely works of art.

The architect ably turned a significant life story into one about Froebel’s Kindergarten, illustrating the impact that such childhood studies had on his thinking. As will be demonstrated, the shapes and angles coincide with those practiced on grid-top tables in Froebel’s Kindergarten.

Line Drawing of Wright’s From Generation to Generation Design

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In Frank Lloyd Wright: Graphic Artist, Penny Fowler described the graphic art design for Book One as an abstract linear pattern [that] sweeps across the page, evoking a boyhood walk from corner to corner of a snowy field with Wright’s Uncle John. While the man, indicated by a bold, solid diagonal, proceeds in a straight line, the boy—a series of thin, fractured lines in a zigzag pattern—scurries … side to side.

Although Fowler recognized certain ideas regarding Froebel’s Kindergarten in Wright’s work, she apparently missed the evidence in Wright’s From Generation to Generation design, insofar as implications of geometric shapes and angles displayed by Wright in his portrayal were concerned.

Natural Beauty

By age sixteen, Wright had experienced Nature on the farm in a religious sense—soothing to the body, mind, and soul and enlightening to the creative spirit. Faced with hard working days and restless nights, he would go to bed each evening, dreaming of awaking the next morning to nature’s woody smells, harmonious sounds, and vivid sights of the valley and the unique education that it had to offer.

He observed trees, branches, vines, leaves, flowers, and fruits to see in them the essential elements of life as geometric patterns of dotted lines (points) giving way to straight and curved lines enclosing space, thereby creating two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional solids. To Wright, Nature was the perfect replica of Froebel’s Kindergarten (children’s garden) with its geometric crystallite appearance lying at the heart of human understanding.

In church on Sunday, the day of rest, the youngster sang Unitarian hymns, read biblical verses, recited Welsh prayers, and listened to family members speak of God. From a prepared text of his aunt Jane’s, he heard her speak of man loving beauty and beauty loving man, concluding that the tenderness of all life spreads this thought with happy feeling (Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography, 302).

With the pleasant thought—beauty loves man—deeply rooted in his boy-mind, Wright would live to see beauty in most things around him—garden resorts, Japanese art, simplicity in design, landscapes of Puerto Rico, desert environments, and even in his Knox Roadster. He recognized the beauty of cantilevered tree branches, quarried stone for Taliesin and Hillside, music, living rooms, songs, and the Lloyd-Jones chapel.

For his clients, he noted beauty in the Winslow House, Unity Temple, Hollyhock House, Wingspread, Imperial Hotel, and the Usonian House. For himself, he saw beauty in Taliesin and Taliesin West and, especially for his children, beauty in the playroom of his Oak Park home. Wright, for more than eighty years, witnessed and experienced beauty in daily life, including icicles that he ensured would be created and admired in his Usonian homes.

Usonian Icicles on Solari Bell

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He absorbed from Froebel the very things his mother recognized and treasured for their intrinsic value. She trained her son to appreciate art forms through the fascination of Froebel’s exercises using simple materials: wood blocks, parquet tiles, wood sticks, metal rings, perforating needles, and thread; interlacing, weaving, drawing, folding, and cutting paper; peas and wires; cardboard; and modeling clay.

Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations paved a new path in a journey started by an eleven-year-old immigrant girl, a journey that eventually led back to the valley settled by the Lloyd-Jones family. Eventually, adjacent property would be owned and named by the grandson and famous architect in honor of the Welsh poet, Taliesin, who according to legend glorified fine art.

Reminiscent of beautiful playthings on grid-top tables in Froebel’s Kindergarten, Taliesin in its unmitigated design added beauty to beauty and added it again, the same objective that Anna, daughter of faithful and dutiful Wisconsin prairie pioneers, taught her son. Ultimately, deep-rooted footprints of the architect-son swept paths of beauty back and forth, zigzagging across America and around the world, foreshadowing his legacy and inspiring a familiar story of adding beauty to beauty and adding it again.

It is no coincidence that the shapes and angles found in Wright’s preliminary drawing titled From Generation to Generation for the cover of Book One: Family, a section of Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography exhibits combinations of shapes and angles learned by children while conducting practice exercises in Froebel’s authentic German Kindergarten.

Line Drawings of Wright’s From Generation to Generation Design

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By tracing the lines (shapes and angles) designed by Wright for the cover pattern, the design not only depicts the direction of the straight-line movement of Uncle John and the changes in direction of the zigzag line movements by Wright, but significantly the crossover configuration of both the uncle’s straight-lined and the nephew’s zigzagged ventures integrated Wright’s journey with that of the Lloyd-Jones family—a story that speaks about his Froebel’s Kindergarten travels.

The arrangement and relationship of the lines are precisely the way Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned his childhood experience, expressed in the same manner that the architect viewed life itself. Beautiful in appearance, interweaving horizontal, vertical, right-slanted, and left-slanted lines, taken as a composite whole, resulted in the creation of lovely shapes of three-sided, four-sided, and five-sided figures, along with magnificent angles of 60°, 90°, and 120°.

Thus, in a single drawing, Wright brought into play the essence of a design method for pattern development that captured the true spirit of his entire body of work. The preliminary study accomplished exactly what Wright set out to do during his own lifelong journey—telling an important story about Family and Nature all wrapped up in geometric beauty, as he had diligently learned early on with his mother at his side in studies of authentic Froebel’s Kindergarten.

CHAPTER 2

Master Architect − Schoolmaster

T he life and legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright is a testament to his ingenuity, creativity, and perseverance of life-changing experiences including personal loss, grief, and failure, all balanced by his ultimate notoriety, high levels of success, and lasting happiness. As a world-renowned architect, he never failed to surprise experts and novices alike with his futuristic, innovative solutions and techniques for designing beautiful buildings totally integrated and blended within natural environments.

Architectural Beginnings

As a young child, his mother attempted to enrich his life with literature and drawings depicting the great cathedrals of England.

London Saint Paul’s Cathedral - Wood Engraving (circa 1840)

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Permission Gutenberg.org Cornell University Library

In her home, she prepared and guided learning activities believed to promote originality in thought and self-reliance. By the time Wright was in his early teens, he had developed a devout appreciation for Nature by observing and preserving through picture taking its diverse and unifying patterns and intricacies of design and beauty.

Ironically, European buildings never gained favor with the famous architect, while utilizing an exceptional design method that proved, at least in Wright’s mind, to be the pure antagonist of European-inspired art forms. In so doing, just under 150 years since his birth in 1867, Wright still provides scholars, writers, admirers, and practitioners with what seems to be endless life episodes filled with mystery, intrigue, independence, and truth.

The mystique associated with the man and his architectural art almost defies human understanding and comprehension. How could one person practice architecture for seven decades, receive sixty commissions in one year alone (1950) at age eighty-three, and design every building strikingly different in appearance yet totally parallel in form and function?

Beginning at age nineteen, in 1886, in Chicago, and ending almost seventy-three years later at nearly age ninety-two, in 1959, at Taliesin West, the man who was destined to become one of the world’s greatest architects reached back to his childhood days to find a rare combination of learning experiences that piqued his interests and abilities. While applying for and immediately after securing work with a leading architectural firm in Downtown Chicago, Wright began drawing original designs on a drafting table using the basic tools of the trade—T square, compass, triangle, pencil, and straightedge.

Soon Wright would be designing entire buildings for clients of Adler and Sullivan, as well as a family home for himself, so that by 1890, he had his hand in the design of Unity Chapel (1886), Hillside Home School (1887), Frank Lloyd Wright Residence (1889), and several bungalows (1890) in Mississippi.

Before long, while still on the payroll of Adler and Sullivan, Wright was successfully creating new designs for buildings and additions and remodeling for himself and for his friends in Oak Park and other nearby communities, including residences for James Charnley (1891), W. Irving McArthur (1892), George Blossom (1892), Robert G. Edmond (1892), Thomas Gale (1892), Allison W. Harlin (1892), Walter Gale (1893), and Francis Woolley (1893).

Wright especially noted in Frank Lloyd Wright: An Autobiography the attributes of his work with Louis Sullivan:

Whenever the Master would rely upon me for a detail, I would mingle his sensuous efflorescence with some geometric design, because, I suppose, I could do nothing else so well. And too, that way of working to me seemed to hold the surface, give needed contrast, (and) be more architectural (p. 104).

The efflorescent design of the ornate terra-cotta that covers the main facades of the Guaranty Building (1896) in Buffalo clearly evokes Sullivan’s trademark Art Nouveau with its ornamented cornice. Sullivan used intricate terra-cotta ornamentation, with geometric motifs and naturalistic design of flowers, seedpods, and the spreading branches of a tree at the top of the building.

Facades of the Guaranty Building (1896)

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Combinations of geometric design elements appear elsewhere on the flat surfaces of the building, indicative of shapes and angles typical of Froebel’s Kindergarten exercises that particularly reflect Wright’s notable design skills.

Geometric Design Patterns

At the time, new looks in Wright’s early designs incorporated the shapes of hexagons, octagons, and semicircles, which served to extend living space beyond the usual boundaries of more typical square and rectangular rooms and houses. In addition, the main roofs and dormers created by Wright share distinctive triangular shapes with wider overhangs and eaves, with central fireplaces and large chimney masses.

House plans usually show multiple bedrooms with the largest possible living space realized by allowing the living room, dining room, reception room, and terrace to flow together and outward as one. That is, balconies, terraces, and gardens as extensions of inner space tend to obliterate boundaries between the inside and outside of the home.

The exteriors of his earliest houses also show a variety of straight and curve lines with horizontal wood siding, shingles, Roman brick, plaster, and semicircle window sashes and appear most commonly with stoops, steps, and porches. Wright’s interior layouts transform and organize space according to its use and activity—generally, family needs.

Thomas H. Gale House (1892)

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Photograph Collection of Patrick J. Mahoney, AIA

Distinctive geometrical shapes and angles began to take form from the very beginning of Wright’s work as a draftsman and architect. Even though his first homes are of the Queen Anne style, he took care to open floor plans inside toward the outside into gardens, porches, and terraces by featuring semicircular, hexagon, and octagon structures.

Line Drawings of Wright’s Early Floor Plans

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Shapes of the glass art window pattern near the front door of the Gale Residence appear in part in the form of hexagons, which contain angles typical of Froebel’s Kindergarten exercises. Whether the pattern had been selected by Wright from a stock-pattern book, to him, the design displayed natural beauty.

Line Drawing of Thomas H. Gale Residence Glass Art Window Design

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Also, early on, Wright’s glass art windows took on distinctive geometric shapes and proportions with square, rectangle, and rhombus patterns. For instance, the living-room bay windows of the McArthur House (1892) exhibit vertical rhombuses, again typical of child play in German Kindergarten.

McArthur Residence Living Room Bay Windows

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Photographs by Thomas A. Heinz, AIA © 2015 Thomas A. Heinz, AIA

When taken all together, the exterior and interior features of his early residential designs foretold the kinds of buildings that Wright would create over the next decade and generally to larger extent over the rest of his career. The Prairie School, of which Wright’s designs contributed significantly, set a precedent for his thinking about architectural designs for the next sixty years.

The unusual manner in which he integrated and rotated space through geometric forms to enhance human experiences in residential dwellings, commercial buildings, and religious places is unique to the history of modern architecture. He approached every design as a study in problem solving, always attempting to continuously improve the way people live, work, and worship. Nothing was left to chance because he desired to design and/or specify everything in his building plans while paying close attention to every defining detail.

SAMARA, a late Usonian home (1954) reflects within its interior and exterior spaces, designs and patterns by Frank Lloyd Wright that join the outside nature of the building to the inside beauty of the house.

Froebel’s Kindergarten and Nature

A good understanding of the training and education provided to Wright by his mother when he was nine, and according to Wright even later through his teenage years, helps us to better see the point of his design work. In 1876, during America’s Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia, Anna Wright was formally introduced to the methods and principles of Froebel’s Kindergarten—German style. E. Steiger & Co., American supplier of literature and materials for home and school instruction, demonstrated in a pavilion the program of study developed by Friedrich Froebel in Germany, which started during the 1830s.

Living a full generation (1782–1852) before the birth of Wright, Froebel, at age fifty-five, in 1837, opened his first school for children in Blankenburg, located in his native land of Thuringia. Initially, the school was created using colored wool balls, wood cubes and spheres, and parquet tiles or tablets, which included an assortment of squares and triangles, for hands-on play.

By 1850, Froebel would add wood cylinders and sticks, along with paper for piercing, sewing, weaving, folding, and cutting. Slates were created for drawing, while thin wires and garden peas were used for constructing two- and three-dimensional models.

When fully developed, the first Kindergarten consisted of a system of Gifts and Occupations intended for use by children of all ages. Shortly after opening his school in Blankenburg, Froebel came up with the word kindergarten. Turning to nature for the name of his new school seemed like a probable thing to do since a significant part of his own training came about when he worked with Prof. Christian Samuel Weiss at a much earlier time (1815) at the Mineralogical Museum of Berlin University.

With previous interest in studies of minerals and natural laws, Froebel fit in perfectly with Professor Weiss, who at the time had recently formulated theories regarding the classification of minerals according to physical properties (structure), which is to say, based on natural geometric forms, rotational axes and surface planes. Hired as an assistant to Weiss, Froebel organized the university’s spectacular collection of gems and stones and feverishly guarded them for display at the museum.

Based on Weiss’s discoveries of the geometry and internal structure of crystals, Froebel’s work eventually led to new insights into the development and growth of children and subsequently to his idea for creating geometric playthings for young people. In this way, crystallography gave way to a kind of learning that was rooted in the manipulation of geometric toys that took on the form of solids, planes, lines, and points.

Even though Wright was born fifteen years after Froebel’s death, his mother, Anna, in the course of her historic visit to Philadelphia in 1876, would seal a powerful, everlasting connection between two original thinkers and innovators of the nineteenth century. The link between Germany’s schoolmaster and America’s master architect was permanent and well defined once Wright during his teen years discovered in nature’s leaves, flowers, fruits, and weeds of the Midwest landscape on his uncle’s farm in Wisconsin the geometric and crystallite-like forms, the same ones devised by Friedrich Froebel.

As a young lad, Wright discovered the essence of nature—seen as simple geometric forms discovered and invented as a child under the guidance of his mother in Froebel’s Kindergarten. The spheres, triangles, squares, hexagons, and octagons that found their way into his thinking and earliest architectural drawings between 1886 and 1893 sprang directly from nature—identical in shape and angular structure of crystals studied by Froebel in 1814.

Wright was among the first generation of American children to be schooled in Froebel’s German Kindergarten. In 1876, when Anna Wright visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, she and her family were living near Boston where several English-speaking kindergartens had been established between 1860 and 1874. In addition, publications written in English describing Froebel’s methods were available as early as 1869, which very likely became known to Anna after her family moved to Massachusetts in 1870 when her son was three years old.

At the same time, a local Froebel Society existed in Boston, which promoted training programs for teachers, mothers, and nurses. With the upstart of Froebel’s Kindergarten classes for young children coupled with a newly identified need for a strong educational movement in America, Anna immediately recognized the importance of providing her son with the best education available, as a young boy.

Froebel’s Kindergarten Artifacts

In the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at Taliesin West (now Columbia University’s Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library and the Museum of Modern Art with joint stewardship of the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives), there was (is) An Illustrated Catalogue of Kindergarten Gifts and Occupation Material produced by E. Steiger containing general descriptions of Froebel’s playthings. The original catalogue also contains an extensive listing of Kindergarten literature and Steiger’s Designs for Weaving, which includes sixty-five patterns for paper mats and strips.

A delicately decorated box cover, preserved in the archives, comes from an original box of materials purchased by Anna Wright from E. Steiger & Co. At the time the box was purchased, it contained one steel-weaving needle, twenty mats of assorted colors and widths with corresponding paper strips, and design patterns on twelve plates. The entire package of weaving materials, in a strong paper box with a very fine and beautiful chromolithographed cover, sold for $0.75 in 1876.

Weavings completed by Wright as a child accompany the box in the archives. Fifteen paper weavings available in the archives have been identified by the author as designs taken almost exclusively from the sixty-five patterns for paper mats and strips produced by E. Steiger in 1876.

These are the only existing Froebel’s Kindergarten materials known to be used by Wright that can be traced directly back to his mother’s visit to the Centennial Exposition display and demonstration of Froebel’s Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations in Philadelphia.

The E. Steiger sales catalogue published on May 10, 1876, in conjunction with the opening of America’s Centennial Celebration at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia described and illustrated in general terms the gifts and occupations of Froebel’s Kindergarten.

E. Steiger Catalogue (May 1876)

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Froebel’s Design Tendencies

Nevertheless, in spite of only a meager amount of archival evidence, Wright spoke confidently about the influence that Froebel’s Gifts and Occupations had on his architecture and graphic art work. Froebel’s Kindergarten is a comprehensive education program filled with an assortment of, yet highly integrated, exercises, and Wright’s reference to them as a youngster leaves little doubt that he had experimented with many of Froebel’s Gifts and Occupations, ranging from solids, planes, lines, and points, eventually incorporating Kindergarten design methods and forms into his lifelong work.

Geometric Design

The drawing that Wright prepared for Adler and Sullivan for employment demonstrated his astute ability to design beautiful buildings. Such evidence lies within the geometric form presented through the sophisticated integration of squares, circles, pentagons, and octagons in a study plan and elevation drawing for what he later called a Dream House (1887). Three years later, the study-plan drawing and elevation rendering were turned into a lovely residence for the Henry N. Cooper House (1890), although the home was never built.

Line Drawing of Cooper House Floor Plan (1890)

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All the same, the floor plan drawing indicates distinctively Froebel’s tendencies in design and layout through the integration of circle, square, pentagon, and octagon rooms, fireplaces, and windows. The drawing shows the various rooms of the house as a highly integrated system of geometrical shapes tied together through angles shared by individual parts.

More specifically, the line drawing reveals design and layout patterns characteristic of Froebel with a circular dining room and semicircular fireplaces enclosed within an octagon building. A large irregular octagon central hall occupies the middle section of the house with a semicircular entrance in the front and a partial-octagon fireplace in the rear.

An attached pentagon music room and library emerge from the central hallway by way of an obtuse angle with the shortest side of the pentagon linked to the dining room by a square atrium of the same dimension. Through a square hallway of the same size, the dining room attaches to a kitchen and service wing with servant quarters above and a storeroom below.

A rectangular veranda with semicircular steps projects forward from the pentagon library. On the opposite side of the great hall are an upper-level pentagon sitting room, with large half-octagon windows facing in opposite directions, and a partial-octagon fireplace. A rectangular bedroom containing a partial-octagon fireplace extends from the sitting room exposed to the outside through an octagon casement window.

A rectangle wing behind the upper-level sitting room and adjacent to the hall opens into an octagon stairwell which leads to a balcony overlooking the great hall and an entrance to the sitting room. The rectangle wing also contains two semicircular fireplaces at the corners of the back walls. To the front of the sitting room is a spiraled staircase enclosed in a circular tower toward the front of the house, which leads from the bedroom to the upper-story sitting room.

Here was a young, intelligent chap barely twenty years of age in his very first rendering showing promise as a talented architect, who took fundamental shapes and angles of Kindergarten Gifts and Occupations and molded them into a highly integrated, artistic expression of inherent beauty.

CHAPTER 3

Froebel’s Kindergarten Gifts and Kindergarten Occupations

F roebel’s system, the one experienced by Wright, consisted of multiple exercises organized into a series of interrelated Kindergarten Gifts and Kindergarten Occupations. The genius of Wright thrived in this rich paradigm of hands-on learning where he could visualize and experiment with spatial relationships using geometrically shaped objects, manipulated on proportionally scaled grid-top tables.

Children’s Playthings

Kindergarten Gifts are given to children, played with and