Froebel's Kindergarten Gifts and the Early Work of Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright's style of architecture has been thought to be idiosyncratic. This study looks at his early work as a system, and starts by considering the system of Froebel's kindergarten which Wright experienced in childhood. Froebel's kindergarten method included pattern-making exercises on grids, similar to the method of architectural education which Durand introduced at L'ficole polytechnique at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The geometric structure of these symmetrical crystalline patterns, in which a multiplicity of components is resolved into intersecting figures, can be discerned in Wright's architecture. The patterns are generally 2-dimensional. Wright set himself the problem of translating the functional briefs of building problems into a 3-dimensional expression of Froebel's idea. He recognised this possibility in Sullivan's work and more particularly in Sullivan's system of ornament which has a discipline analogous to Froebel's. In his early work Wright gradually transforms the conventional idea of a building, as an envelope containing an organisation of rooms, into a system of components, piers, balustrades, and roof planes which represent the overall pattern of the building, with little distinction between inside and outside.