Description
This talk is focused on Froebel’s Gifts. The Gifts are specially designed objects that were designed to be given to children to explore and create. The objects were designed to be used in open-ended play activities, and each gift was meant to help the child begin to understand the properties or affordances of objects in relation to him/herself and the surrounding world. The Gifts have a symbolic as well as practical value to Froebelian pedagogues. The Gifts are just one aspect of a Froebelian Kindergarten, and may have been used in a variety of ways. However, Froebel’s ideas about the use of the gifts is clearly articulated in his Pedagogics of the Kindergarten (Froebel, trans J. Jarvis, 1887).According to recollections byt Frank Lloyd Wright, his mother, Anna Wright, learned about Froebel’s Gifts at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, PA, USA), and used the Gifts in her home Kindergarten. About the Gifts and his early learning, Frank Lloyd Wright has said:
“A small interior world of colour and form now came within grasp of small fingers. Colour and pattern, in the flat, in the round. Shapes that lay hidden behind the appearances all about. . . Here was something for invention to seize, and use to create. These ‘Gifs’ came into the grey house in drab old Weymouth and made something live that had never lived before” (Frank Lloyd Wright, cited in Provenzo, 2009:11)
"The virtue of all this [paper weaving and stick-and-pea construction] 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 [Wright's emphasis]. I learned to 'see' this way and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals of Nature, I wanted to design" (Frank Lloyd Wright, cited in Rubin, 1989:30)
"Kindergarten training, as I have shown, proved an unforeseen asset: for one thing, because all my planning was devised on a properly proportional unit system [the unit-scored tabletop] .... Later, I found technological advantages when this system was applied to heights. In elevation, therefore, soon came the vertical module as experience might dictate .... Invariably it [the unit-sys- tem] appears in organic architecture as visible feature in the fabric of the design-insuring unity of proportion" (Frank Lloyd Wright, cited in Rubin, 1989:30)
| Period | 6 May 2017 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Reappraisals and Revisions’ conference for the University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Oxford, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |