New Century, New Child, New Art

1900s–1910s

For many designers, writers, and reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, children were the living symbol of the sweeping changes that ushered in the birth of the modern. As the focus of millennial fears and utopian dreams, they seemed an inexhaustible source of renewal, evoking both a paradise lost in the remote past and the future possibility of an ideal city or state.

A reformed and integrated approach to every area of the child's experience emerged through the New Art, an amalgam of the Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau, both of them tendencies that emphasized the unity of all art forms, the revival of handcraft, and the revitalizing of design through the use of organic forms and imagery. In emergent artistic centers in Europe and America—from Glasgow and Chicago to Rome, Vienna, and Budapest—the leading designers and intellectuals of the day, many of them women, used this approach to shape the material world of the modern child.

These aesthetic roots coalesced with a social, democratizing concept of art in the kindergarten movement, in which emphasis was placed on the child's enjoyment of the creative process and an intuitive investigation of materials. Like the New Art, the new pedagogy emphasized authentic expression, the inspiration of the natural world, and the creative potential of every individual, every child.

Avant-Garde Playtime

1910s–1930s

The artistic and educational reform movements that had opened the twentieth century set the tone for avant-garde explorations during and immediately after World War I. Groups working simultaneously in different countries, with a growing interchange between them—including Italian Futurists, the De Stijl group in the Netherlands, German Expressionist architects, modernists in the newly constituted state of Czechoslovakia, and teachers and students at the Bauhaus school of design and art—energized the modern movement in design.

Many such avant-gardists sought to refresh their creativity through recapturing a playful, untutored attitude toward the world—the "innocent eye" of the child—and stripping away extraneous elements such as historicist ornament to get back to the purest forms of human experience and language. Children's naively subversive modes of questioning the world around them offered a model for creative experimentation, and for probing social attitudes or revealing the absurd. Opening themselves up to children's perceptual worlds, avant-garde designers set out to create innovative forms of furniture, toys, books, and interiors that might release youthful energy and imagination, and thereby help shape the society of the future.

Light, Air, Health

1920s–1930s

Modernism revealed its greatest idealism in design for children between the two world wars, uniting a concern for the health and safety of the young with determination to transform society. The utopian society of the future, it was argued, would have the same dynamic curiosity, openness, and unaffected simplicity as children themselves. In this way, children would become the agents of a systematic modernization of traditional culture, the heralds of the new way of life.

Medical, educational, and design reformers of the interwar years believed that light, hygiene, and air should permeate all aspects of a child's early environments. Harnessing the language of abstraction as well as new materials and industrial production, designers developed new modern schools, nurseries, clothing, and furniture that were simple, light, and flexible: a tabula rasa upon which the modern child could inscribe his or her identity. Physical education, delivered through schools and clubs, encouraged children to participate in forms of modern dance, gymnastics and sport, whether as a means of inculcating collective values or of promoting health and self-expression.

If the built environment was central to shaping the larger awareness of modern society, the mental environment of the child also required attention. Interactive picture books and construction toys led children on spatial, temporal, and imaginative journeys into the wider world of things and ideas, preparing them to function as members of a modern industrialized society.

Children and the Body Politic

1920s–1940s

Despite the Romantic ideal of modern childhood as a time of innocence to be preserved, children could not help but be implicated in the major political tendencies of the twentieth century. As symbols of domestic life, national identity, and the future, they were one of the key motifs in visual propaganda from the 1920s through World War II. During this time, many politically engaged modernists used their skills to proclaim the benefits to children of radical social change, as well as highlight the collateral damage they suffered in wartime. Designers were recruited for the causes of various state-run and political youth movements, to design uniforms, magazines, and environments, such as for children's clubs in the Soviet Union and children's colonies in Fascist Italy.

Children became the focus of patriotic consumption on the part of their parents, and there was a growing demand throughout Europe, the United States, and Japan for modern books, clothing, and toys that would inculcate the appropriate political beliefs, thereby transposing adult politics into the imaginary and material worlds of children. But an equally powerful theme emerges: design as a therapeutic agent for children damaged by war, informed by the unshakeable belief of many artists and educators in the power of design to transcend politics and heal wounds.

Regeneration

1940s–1960s

Life after the end of World War II was perilous for millions of displaced, starving, and orphaned children, particularly in Europe and Japan, but massive children's welfare and school-building programs captured a spirit of hopeful postwar reconstruction. Across the ideological spectrum in the United States as well as Europe, children were seen as key to visions of constructing better, more egalitarian worlds. At the same time, the treatment of children rapidly became a crucial sphere of Cold War ideological contest, with idealized, child-centered depictions of community and family life intensifying on both sides of the East-West divide.

Soaring toy sales furthered economic regeneration but, in the aftermath of such brutality and devastation also triggered debates about a field of design some saw as imbued with militarism, pernicious nationalism, and negative racial or gender stereotyping. Many avant-garde designers instead sought to recover a lost innocence embodied in the spontaneity of children's art, and to emulate the constructive impulse of children's play. International groups of concerned child psychologists, manufacturers, educators, and designers joined forces to promote "good toys" that were well designed, safe, and nonviolent. Meanwhile, in the ruins of many European cities, similarly interdisciplinary groups of professionals worked with children to reclaim bombed-out areas through therapeutic play, and to reconsider the place of children in the modern city.

Power Play

1960s–1990s

Children and consumer culture have exerted power over each other (as well as over adults) for more than a century. After the period of regeneration following World War II, innovation and mass production, the hallmarks of modern design, fueled a proliferation of goods for children and contributed to intensified market research and advertising aimed at children all over the world, as well as to concerns about their exploitation. Here we look at significant points of junction between children and the commercial realm of modern design, focusing on the period from the 1960s to 2000s, a broad span of time held together by the prevailing concept of the child as an individual consumer, cognizant and autonomous.

In this period, design for children has demonstrated tangible advances in materials and techniques as well as the influence of external factors such as the Cold War. Power has been a prominent and slippery theme in this narrative: the power of global brands and companies, the power of electronic and digital media, and the power of children themselves, who, over time, have come to wield more purchasing ability and exert more influence on adult consumption. As retail consultant Paco Underhill observed at the close of the twentieth century, "You no longer need to stay clear of the global marketplace just because you're three-and-a-half feet tall, have no income to speak of and are not permitted to cross the street without Mom. You're an economic force, now and in the future, and that's what counts."

Designing Better Worlds

1960s–2000s

The modern world is fraught with inequity, as is keenly evidenced by drastic disparities in the security and quality of life of children around the world: they are hungry and sick, they labor in deplorable conditions, they are victims of violence, abuse, and exploitation. Some of these dark realities began long before the twentieth century, and others are the result of more recent political and sociocultural shifts and may be linked to developments in modern design; the AK-47, for example, an assault rifle designed in the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, is simple and light enough to be wielded, stripped, and reassembled by child soldiers as young as eight years old.

In the last half-century, complex and often contradictory ideas about the status, rights, and needs of children in the modern world have emerged through passionate public discourse among adults—educators, parents, politicians. It has been through design that these changing notions, abstract but directly felt by children, have been made manifest. Starting in the 1960s designers broke with established conventions in order to challenge institutional, authoritarian, and commercial structures, and among the results were alternative living environments that responded to the idea of a community's collective responsibility for children, the movement toward an ethical, sustainable design culture, and the increased visibility of inclusive, therapeutic, and assistive design for children with disabilities and other challenges.

Among the divergent new objects and environments produced for children in the closing decades of the twentieth century, those presented here herald a pronounced progressive or idealistic philosophy; they attempt to communicate to children that they deserve a better world and that this world might be possible.

Kindergarten Movement

A new way of thinking about the child was taking hold around 1900, one that questioned the mind-numbing traditional methods of learning by rote, and treated children as active learners. Inspired by early-nineteenth-century educational theorists, above all Friedrich Froebel in Germany, progressive teachers of young children embraced singing, dancing, direct observation of nature, and, most importantly, open-ended play with real objects and materials. This holistic focus on each child's physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities, they believed, stimulated more effective learning than harsh discipline and copying. By the opening decades of the twentieth century, the kindergarten movement's wider international impact was beginning to trigger both avant-garde artistic experimentation and a decisive shift in educational methods: in 1906 Maria Montessori established her first Casa dei Bambini in Rome, and in 1919 Rudolf Steiner his first school in Germany—initiatives that have continued to inform educational theory and inspire modern design to this day.

Glasgow

By 1900 Glasgow had made a spectacular transformation from medieval city and classical mercantile center to an industrial powerhouse of the British Empire, a process of modernization that engendered shocking dislocations, both social and visual, with children as both its beneficiaries and its victims. The challenge for progressive designers like Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Jessie M. King, and their contemporaries at the Glasgow School of Art was to develop a new visual language that would infuse the city's industrial culture with a mystical sense of nature implicit in the name Glasgow (from the Gaelic Glaschu, signifying a "dear green place"), and would express the city's modernity as well as its remote Arcadian past. As part of their commitment to a process of aesthetic and social renewal, these designers addressed the needs of children through acclaimed innovations in school architecture, educational publishing, and dress reform.

Chicago

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Chicago, the second largest city in the United States and a hotbed of Progressive Era reform, was both socially and physically redesigned to benefit its youngest residents. Children were a spiritual inspiration for modern architects, notably Frank Lloyd Wright and others associated with the Prairie School, a predominantly Midwestern movement. In his "Kindergarten Chats," a series of articles published from 1901–02, Chicago architect Louis H. Sullivan explicitly encouraged a childlike interpretation of nature and form as the pure source for a modern, organic, and uniquely American architecture. At the same time, organizations like Hull House provided social services and agitated for political reform on behalf of children, especially in working-class and immigrant families. This and another Chicago landmark, the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago, were leading exponents of modern education, including manual/industrial instruction for children. These institutions also joined a national revolution known as the Playground Movement, in which Chicago was a beacon.

Vienna

Children were prominent in the aesthetic ferment of turn-of-the-century Vienna, where there was a fascinating convergence of innovative pedagogy, modern design, and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, who was developing his groundbreaking theory of child development as a series of psychosexual stages driven by libidinal desires, recognized the distinctiveness of children as individuals, taking seriously their fantasy worlds and mental anguish. His methods added an influential voice to calls for less repressive childcare and education that was echoed in the freeform teaching of Franz Cižek's pioneering classes for children at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (School of applied arts). Cižek's colleagues and older design students drew inspiration from the uninhibited expression and bold colors of the children's work, and in the Wiener Werkstätte—an Arts and Crafts workshop in which many of them were also involved—the production of modern playthings, books, clothes, and interiors for children was put on the same footing as fine art.

Rome

By 1900 Italy remained at the margins of industrialized Europe, lagging far behind in terms of economic, social, and technological development. But a small number of radical artists, social reformers, and educators in Rome dedicated themselves to addressing the plight of children in the city and surrounding countryside. Among them were Francesco Randone and Maria Montessori, who established innovative, activity-based models of education that emphasized spontaneous interaction with teaching materials and a stimulating classroom environment. Arts and Crafts architect Alessandro Marcucci and his brother-in-law, Futurist artist Giacomo Balla, worked with medical specialists to set up schools for the rural poor; attending to the education and needs of children was, in their words, "the action of an avant-garde. This work precedes the inevitable transformation of rural life and presupposes a new cultural and economic order."

Budapest

Drawing inspiration from the heroic vision of peasant life celebrated by the novelist Leo Tolstoy and leaders of the British Arts and Crafts movement, a group of Hungarian designers established an artists' colony in Gödöllő, near Budapest. The search for totality of artistic expression and a style for the new century was rooted in the concept of the colony as a collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk, a unified artwork that would be created by every colony member in every medium, from buildings and stained glass to clothing and toys. Children from varied social and ethnic backgrounds figured prominently in the colony's collective program to modernize vernacular crafts and establish a shared way of life; the emphasis was on fostering their self-sufficiency and unhampered development as creative individuals, whether working in the colony's weaving workshop and craft studios, creating their own designs at home, or playing in an idyllic natural environment.

The New School

In the late 1920s there was a paradigmatic shift in the design of schools, ushering in more welcoming, airy, and flexible spaces that were seen by progressive educators and design reformers as embodiments of the more equitable and open society to which they aspired. Much of the thinking about the "new school" was also based on the relationship between children's health and education, specifically the need for schools to compensate for the poor diet and lack of hygienic facilities in many children's home life, and to curb the spread of infectious diseases. Typically the new school was single-story, opening on to sheltered outdoor spaces, along the lines of open-air schools that were initially targeted at children in the first stages of tuberculosis. Reflecting modern attitudes toward teacher-student interaction, open classrooms were designed to accommodate different activities simultaneously, with furniture that could be reconfigured for individual or informal group-based learning rather than being arranged in inflexible rows.

The Healthy Body

The profound social and psychological results of World War I had affected how people thought about the future, triggering an almost obsessive concern with children's health. As a symbolic entity, the child's body in the 1920s and 30s was inscribed with the paradoxical pressures of modernity, signifying on the one hand a connection with nature, primal emotion, and unrestrained psychic energy, and on the other the idea of a perfectible human machine that could be conditioned to function within a utopian, modern world. The years after the war saw a new emphasis on physical culture, the design of healthier clothing, housing, medical products for children, and graphic propaganda about new lifestyles. Advances in medical knowledge and behavioral psychology contributed to a sounder understanding of the environmental conditions needed for the proper physical and mental development of young children, and modernist architecture reflected the consensus that access to plenty of fresh air, sunlight, and water was a route to children's health.

At Home with Modernism

"Teach your children that a house is only habitable when it is full of light and air, and when the floors and walls are clear," urged the avant-garde architect Le Corbusier in 1923. Modernist architects and designers did not have a monopoly on concepts of hygiene and practicality, but their use of simple, minimalist schemes, built-in features, and washable surfaces stood up to the wear and tear of boisterous young people. Blackboard panels encouraged self-expression, and troublesome chalk dust was easily cleaned from floors and tabletops covered with linoleum or cork tiles. The easy-to-clean principle was extended to simple, undecorated furniture and toys. Glass, plywood, enamel-painted wood, and chromed steel—all modernist materials of choice—could be kept absolutely spotless. Similar qualities of abstraction, clarity, and simplicity transformed the appearance of modern children's books, in which some of the practitioners at the highest level of both design and literature came together to produce volumes to nurture and challenge young minds.

Reclaiming the City

The exuberant reappearance of children in public urban space after the experience of confinement or evacuation during World War II was marked in films, photography, and artworks—such as Ben Shahn's Liberation—that showed children's spontaneous play amidst the ruins of bombed out buildings. The children in these works epitomized a new attitude, at once disruptive and challenging but also playful, that inspired a new approach to the creative redevelopment of Europe's shattered cityscapes. Adopting a grassroots approach to urban planning and playground design, architects and social workers transformed bomb sites and desolate lots into landscapes for adventure play, including free-form construction, with adult facilitators. On both sides of the Cold War divide, attempts were made to engage the young in imagining future cities and to prepare them for participation in urban planning, building, and administration. A number of construction toys, educational books, and programs helped to foster children's environmental awareness and appreciation of modern architecture and designed environments.

Back to School

The wartime devastation in Europe, rising birthrates on both sides of the Atlantic, and a shortage of materials created an opportunity for inventiveness and collaboration when it came to constructing new schools rapidly. The postwar school was considered an important site for nourishing values of the individual, the community, and the state, and many governments backed the wide-scale implementation of earlier experimental, low-rise models developed for reformist pedagogies in the 1930s.

In addition to an emphasis on prefabrication and building economically with steel frames and glass walls, architects and engineers examined the psychological effects of lighting, airflow, and color to determine what was best for a learning environment. Artists and educators collaborated on artworks to enhance the fabric of school buildings, accompanied by an expansion of creative arts in many schools' curricula. In plan, design, interior decoration, and furnishings, the postwar school gave material form to an ideal vision of the future.

Postwar Play

At mid-century, children's play was a restorative and inspiring cause for modern design in both private and public spheres. Internationally, designers, manufacturers, educators, and parents championed "good toys"—abstract, geometric, and nonviolent objects with pedagogical value, fine craftsmanship, and durability. Iconic toys of the immediate postwar period—such as Slinky and Lego building bricks—endure today, even in competition with more elaborate toys and video games.

Beyond the toy, modern-minded adults became increasingly interested in playful furniture and environments, and in enriching the educational potential of the child's first surroundings. Child development experts like Jean Piaget, Arnold Gesell, and Benjamin Spock contended that room for play should be part of a child's everyday space, and playtime was recognized as essential for promoting autonomy, stimulating motor development, and encouraging aesthetic appreciation. In the United States especially, the mid-century modern playroom became an important site of free expression and discovery, as well as an anchor of fervent contemporary discourse around "correct" decoration and taste.

Space Wars

The early space age was a period of technological innovation and political and cultural transformation that began in 1957, with the Soviet Union's launch of the satellite Sputnik, and peaked in 1969, with the United States' first manned moon landing, by Apollo 11. People of all ages and on both sides of the Cold War were buoyed by childlike wonder and optimism, even amid fear of the prospects of outer space and the threat of nuclear war. Design for children in this period was remarkably inventive, producing stylish (and implicitly ideological) toys, environments, films, and television programs that furnished fantasy worlds for children in whose real worlds the distinctions between possible and impossible, science fact and fiction, were increasingly blurred.

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World, a provocative manifesto published in 1971, accused designers of being negligent and entangled with corporate bottom lines and encouraged them to pursue more meaningful responses to universal needs and inclusive design. The book featured more than one hundred examples of thoughtful design projects for children, including experimental cube-based childcare centers, better childproof containers for medicines and household cleaners, and safer playgrounds and school buses. Papanek naturally outraged many of his colleagues, but thanks to him and to other progressive activists, the movement toward socially and ecologically responsible design became increasingly prominent in the late twentieth century.
A moral imperative took hold in the design world in the 1970s and '80s, to consider the perspectives of previously marginalized groups, including people with disabilities. The result was the field of inclusive design, also called universal design, which encompasses the specialist fields of therapeutic design (to treat or alleviate specific conditions) and assistive design (to enhance abilities and independence) for people with audiovisual, motor, and developmental disabilities. Inclusive design has proved to be a uniquely thoughtful, demanding, and often quite personal realm of the profession, all the more so when it focuses on children.

The Universal Child

In the past three decades the emergence of a so-called global civil society and the increasing influence of transnational aid organizations have shaped the idea of the "universal child," signifying children across the globe linked in kinship to all other humans and the natural world as well as possessing universal inalienable rights. These were codified in 1959 by the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, and further enforced in 1989 by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, whose guiding principles for state and local governments as well as for UNICEF and other international aid organizations have been ratified by every member of the United Nations except for the United States and Somalia. Designers have paid tribute to these efforts, and given them physical form by creating powerful graphics and innovative products that have benefited countless children in vulnerable or dire circumstances.

Playground Revolution

By the early 1960s the playground's standard kit of parts—swings, slides, seesaws—had been revealed to be outmoded and inadequate, in part by two major developments in playground design. The first was the radical junk or adventure playground—bomb sites and desolate lots reclaimed by the ingenious constructions of children—an idea that flourished in postwar Europe. The second was abstract, freestanding (and often concrete) play sculpture in Europe and the United States, which posited, according to Architectural Review, a "new relationship between art and citizen."
Both of these models came under critical fire, felt by different adult factions to be too dangerous on the one hand, too static on the other. Ambitious designers experimented with combining the most salient qualities of the two, the adventurous and the sculptural, in proposals and sites that often also evinced an interest in socially responsible design. The ideals were noble, but the results were mixed, and concerns about safety, liability, and accessibility challenged the endurance of novel designs, if they were even built. Despite its hindrances, failures, and criticisms, The Playground Revolution, a term originating about 50 years ago, never really ended, as these examples from around the world attest. Today playgrounds remain touchstones and rallying points for the well-being of children in the modern world and a controversial but rich area for innovation.