The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an ...idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children's museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. Ogata describes how a historically rooted belief in children's capacity for independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that persists today. From building blocks to Gumby, playhouses to Playskool trains, Creative Playthings to the Eames House of Cards, Crayola fingerpaint to children's museums, material goods and spaces shaped a popular understanding of creativity, and Designing the Creative Child demonstrates how this notion has been woven into the fabric of American culture.
In 1858, the French metalworking firm Christofle presented an allegorical group of five putti cast in aluminium to Emperor Napoléon III. This surtout de table, or centrepiece, was dedicated to the ...Emperor in recognition of his personal support of the scientific project that resulted in aluminium, a new discovery of the 1850s. Together with another, slightly different, example for the investor Isaac Pereire, the composition suggests new ways of understanding mid‐nineteenth‐century goldsmithing, the uses of allegory and the imagery of modernity in the applied arts. This dynamic interplay between modern materials and artistic traditions, this essay argues, has much to tell us about the metallic surface and its role in the making of the French Second Empire.
English Discusses postwar American elementary school design, considering theories about education and the effect of environment on children's learning. Looks in particular at the Crow Island School ...in Winnetka, IL, by Eliel Saarinen, Eero Saarinen, Lawrence B. Perkins, E. Todd Wheeler, and Philip Will Jr; Heathcote Elementary School in Scarsdale, NY, by the firm of Perkins and Will; and two schools by the firm of Caudill Rowlett Scott in Blackwell, OK.
Design for the Modern Child Ogata, Amy F
The journal of modern craft,
03/2014, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
"Design for the Modern Child," which showcases new products, furniture, and playthings along with a select group of historical examples, are among several child-themed exhibitions on view at the ...Philadelphia Museum of Art's Perelman Building during the summer and fall of 2013. The show is one of a series designed explicitly for children and their parents or caregivers, who can also attend an exhibit- related program and make a project just outside the gallery. "Design for the Modern Child" is small in scale and it offers a variety of goods, from toys and furniture to textiles, tools, and wallpaper. (Quotes from original text)
Educational toys, objects intended to teach skill or develop abilities, became a common feature of postwar childhood. With the rise of the American birthrate after World War II, toymakers exploited ...the newly prosperous middle‐class market and promoted educational toys as fundamental equipment for raising baby‐boom children. The major American toymakers, including Holgate, Playskool, and Creative Playthings, as well as architects, designers, and even art museums, promised to develop a child's creativity and imagination through the manipulation of specially designed objects. The elevation of creativity in the promotion of toys developed along with discourses on psychology, education, and art.
This article considers how the international exposition was represented in peepshow souvenirs, folding paper devices that gave a three-dimensional view of the interior. Using Walter Benjamin's notion ...of the world's fair as a phantasmagoria, I argue that the optical souvenirs produced for international expositions reconfirmed the enchanted visual experience in a way that other mass-produced souvenirs could not and, moreover, that this held implications for both popular consumption and collective memory.
