#E1523D

centuryofthechild:

Aldo van Eyck. Drawing of sandpits, somersault frames, climbing frames, play tables, and climbing mountains. 1960

Van Eyck, like his friends Peter and Alison Smithson, was fascinated by the relationship between the child and the postwar city. He joined the Department of City Development at Amsterdam Public Works in 1947, and in the decades that followed he designed more than seven hundred playgrounds for the city. These spaces, often created from derelict lots, incorporated sandpits, metal climbing frames, stepping stones, and small concrete divots to collect rainwater in abstract compositions. Van Eyck, who considered physical recreation an important part of children’s development, defined areas for free-form activity without being closed off from the surrounding community.

Learn more at MoMA.org/centuryofthechild

The wonders of Possibility, sci-fi anthology, under the supervision of Sergio Solmi and Carlo Fruttero, Einaudi Edition.

Solar system book by Emile Hamshaw-Jones

This book rapresents our solar system, showing each planet’s average distance from the sun, to scale. Each page rapresents 30 milion miles of space, moving away from the sun. This is about the same distance you would travel, if you went around the Earth in a straight line 1.200 times.

All this scale, the planets’ sizes would be too small to see, and so each planets is depicted 200 times larger than it should be.
This page rapresents the position, but not the scale, of the sun, which has an equatorial diameter of 864.400 miles.

INVENTING KINDERGARTEN

Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.

Froebel believed that education of the very young would enable the flowering of human potential. “By education,” he declared, “the divine essence of man should be unfolded, brought out, lifted into consciousness.” Froebel’s insights would expand the minds not just of children, but also of their teachers. Denied access to universities, women of intellect were also yearning for mental stimulation and Froebel’s system provided an outlet of expression for hundreds of thousands of women around the world who flocked to become kindergarten teachers. Among them was Anna Wright, mother of the future architect. From the world of early kindergarten it is largely the teacher’s output that has been preserved and in this remarkable body of work we witness the stirrings of a new era. Mostly created in the late nineteenth century, the objects on displayed in this exhibition prefigure the aesthetic upheavals of the following century. As kindergarten scholar and collector Norman Brosterman has proposed, in the work undertaken by “kindergartners” we may locate the seed-bed of modern art.

Inventing Kindergarten surveys rare objects and artifacts from the
collection of Norman Brosterman, Froebel scholar and author of the book
Inventing Kindergarten.

found: here

freakyfauna:

Citroën 2cv AZ Engine

Found here.

Alfonso Bialetti. Moka Bialetti, produzione Bialetti, 1933.

1951 Eames Chairs of Zenaloy

via www.eamesoffice.com