Bad Blackenburg Influence - Frank Lloyd Wright

Emilia Kightley-Sutter

In 1840 a small town in Germany called Bad Blackenburg took the first steps into forming what is now known as kindergarten. Kindergarten was founded and also designed architecturally by a man named Friedrich Frobel. Although the original building is not functioning as a kindergarten anymore it has been transformed into a museum dedicated to Frobels life. Frobel studied architecture at the Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. His main concept in inventing kindergarten was to protect and shield children from the misery at the beginning of industrialization. He wanted to protect, educate, and prevent them from horrid working conditions for young people. The original design of the building has been completely renovated but the message of educating children has not been dissolved. The architecture and layout of this kindergarten has a huge role on how the children would behave, adapt, and grow. “Froebel thought existing construction toys, with their realistic, decorative custom-made parts, had a destructive effect on children's imagination” (Toys of the Avant Garde).

Before opening the first kindergarten he opened a school, an orphanage and a teacher training course in Switzerland. Despite political opposition of the first kindergarten the experiment appealed to many and other kindergartens developed around the world. The main political opposition was that children did not have unique needs. The master plan of the garden play area was a circular layout where the “babysitters” surrounded the children and each children had their own circular space to play in. A communist dream. Each circle grew larger and further from the center in accordance to the child’s age. There was an emphasis on play time in child education, the push for kindergarten opened up opportunities to educate children through games and play where the teachers can watch development closely. Some of these games included shapes of wood which could be put together to form houses and structures- this toy began cognitive learning for the child to put ideas together and think differently than just what toys at home taught them. Developing judgement skills which distinguished form, color, grouping, matching, etc. was a main goal- architect Frank Lloyd Wright was known to have grown up with these wooden building blocks.

Another creepy architectural move the designers utilized was a sitting room for the children on more colder of days. The children sat in fixed chairs around a fire place to keep warm. The teachers were to sit nearby and watch the children keep warm. The practice of sitting in a circle around the fire or even in the yard symbolizes the unity of individuals within a larger unity of civilians. The architecture and layout of these playrooms to join children together helped children develop the sense of their own individual power to join in with the larger nature of things. Notable artists and architects that began new movements and give some credit to new kindergarten such as this one in Bad Blackenburg are Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller. They all played with the Frobel geometric toys.