The Institute for Figuring
announces the first in our 2005
lecture series entitled Figuring Minds

Tuesday, April 26 @ 7:00pm
KINDERGARTEN
The Art and Science of Child’s Play
By Norman Brosterman [IFF-L6]
The IFF Lecture #6

The Santa Monica Museum of Art [ more ]
Bergamont Station G1
2525 Michigan Ave.
Santa Monica, CA
310.586.6488
Tickets: $8, members & students $6

Kindergarten – “the garden of children” – is one of the most pervasive institutions in existence: Googling the word Kindergarten yields 11 million results, Christianity 13 million. But the kindergarten most of us experienced as infants is a diluted version of what originated as a radical and highly spiritual system of abstract-design activities whose universal, alternative language of geometric form aimed to cultivate children’s innate ability to observe, reason, express and create. As practiced initially, the aim of kindergarten was “to instill in children an understanding of what an earlier generation would have called ‘the music of the spheres’ – the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation.”
    From Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman

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In his book "Inventing Kindergarten" Norman Brosterman argues that within this lost world of women and children we can locate the seedbed of modern art. With its emphasis on abstract decomposition and building up from elemental forms, the original kindergarten system of the mid-nineteenth century created an education and design revolution that profoundly affected the course of modern art and architecture, as well as physics, music, psychology and the modern mind itself. In this lecture Brosterman will discuss the history of kindergarten and its influence on such modernist giants as Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus school.

An architect, collector, curator and wood carver, Norman Brosterman became interested in Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten system while compiling one of the world’s finest collections of children’s building blocks and construction toys. He is also the author of Out of Time: Designs for the Twentieth Century Future, a book about science fiction visions of futures past. Brosterman’s collection of building blocks became the basis for the “Potential Architecture” exhibition at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal and his collection of sci-fi drawings was the basis for a Smithsonian Institution traveling show.The Institute For Figuring is a nonprofit organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques.

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