"Norman Brosterman discusses 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.
In his book Inventing Kindergarten, 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."

""San Diego's Craft Revolution: From Post-War Modern To California Design" opens October 16th at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park. Since the show includes almost 70 artists and spans roughly 30 years of little-documented local art history, it's a lot to process. To give you a head start, we've put together a list of 10 things to keep in mind before you head out to see this groundbreaking exhibit."

"The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure…

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives…"

"Albers believed that one learned as a result of a direct interaction with life & required that his students become familiar w/ the physical nature of the material world. This was due, in part, to the influence of John Dewey, who advocated for laboratory-based education & coined the phase ‘learning by doing.’ For Dewey, ‘the conditions of daily life’ determined the ‘nature of experience’ & thus, art (aesthetic experience) was to be actively engaged. Indeed, he often praised Dewey, whose ideas were fundamental to the founding of Black Mountain College, where Albers first taught in America from 1933 to 1949. & like Dewey, his pedagogic emphasis lay in practical, concrete exercises: in the artist-educator’s own words ‘learning through conscious practice.’ Similar notions, including the Montessori method as well as those of Froebel, Pestalozzi, & others key to discourse on early childhood development were fundamental to the educational programme of the Bauhaus…"

"Robert Walters...really inspiring...died-in-the-wool Modernist...survey course...focused a lot on 20th century...presented architecture in larger context of design & culture...looked at Bauhaus typography, Futurist manifestoes, Beuys' sculpture alongside the built work of Mies, Marinetti's drawings & projects like Berlin Free University...very visual approach with side-by-side slide comparisons...sort of broad thinking appealed to me...Studio courses & work culture they promoted, really appealed to me too...long hours in studio...M Arch degree...very strong conceptual bent to Rice...influence of Bruce Mau & Sanford Kwinter who collaborated at Rice for 2-3 years...involvement in school was a sort of experiment to see how design thinking could dismantle & reassemble typical seminar/studio formats. Sometimes these experiments were more/less successful, but there was a huge amount of risk-taking. I still like the idea "nothing ventured, nothing gained" that they worked under..."