Century of the Child: Growing by Design

An extensive, important volume on the many intersections of children and design, this book seeks to advance the scholarly inquiry into the evolving relationship between childhood and design, tracking what co-author Juliet Kinchin calls its "fascinating confluence".

Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O'Connor, Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012 (264 pp., $45,00)

Between the 1900 publication of The Century of the Child, by Swedish design reformer Ellen Key, to the 1990 40th International Design Conference Growing by Design, childhood came from being regarded as a rigid, abstract idea anymore, to becoming an engine for the design tools of the 20th century. This evolution during a very rich century in ideological, social, political and economical changes is mapped chronologically in Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, an extensive, important volume on the many intersections of children and design, organised by MoMA Design CuratorJuliet Kinchin and Curatorial Assistant Aidan O'Connor on the occasion of the 2012 exhibition of the same title at the MoMA. With contributions by Tanya Harrod, Medea Hoch, Francis Luca, Amy Ogata, and Maria Paola Maino distributed through seven richly illustrated sections, the book seeks to advance the scholarly inquiry into the evolving relationship between childhood and design, tracking what Kinchin calls its "fascinating confluence".

At the beginning of the 20th century, society — and as part of it, designers and architects — began to slowly advocate that children are a good mediation between ideal and real; with their clean vision on everyday life, uncontaminated by social and cultural conventions, they will always elevate designers' thoughts to a better future.

Top and above: Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O'Connor, <em>Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000</em>, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012 — Top and above: Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O'Connor, *Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000*, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012

Architecture was one of the disciplines that clearly contributed to the evolution of children's life. During and after World War I, crossed by the avant-garde tendencies of the Crystal Chain, De Stijl or Bauhaus, new educational environments such as Eugene Beaudoin's modernist new school, Richard Neutra's active learning schools, or the colonie di infanzia in Italy under the fascist regime. After World War II, children and childhood became an important issue of postwar policies. In order to help them to process the trauma of the experienced war, architects began to see the school as an environment that could heal children's minds and souls.

Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O'Connor, <em>Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000</em>, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012 — Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O'Connor, *Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000*, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012

No less important is the work of designers the child's interior space par excellence: the playroom. Whether designed to enrich the child's creativity, shape its identity or just as private space, the playroom is the microcosm that would transform the child into an adult. Children's furniture evolved from Giacomo Balla's visionary, child-shaped objects in the 20s and Gerrit Rietveld's and Marcel Breuer's bentwood and tubular steel furniture, to Sweden's Ikea — founded in the 40s — and the do-it-yourself movement put forward by Victor Papanek, and even toys made by children out of modern industry's waste in contemporary South Africa.

The creation of a learning environment for children was accompanied by a dynamic, inventive approach to the most important items in a child's existence: toys. As German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel remarked, "play is the highest stage of the child's development", and during the entirety of the 20th century, designers seem to have abided by this rule, creating many iconic exploration in toy design. While the first decade of the century was marked by interest on enriching the creative potential of the children through arts-and-crafts lessons, the following decades bring Swiss puppets and colourful, modern toys in Czechoslovakia, among many others.

The educational paradox that arose in the years between the World Wars makes the reader aware that despite the reformers' wish to protect the child from the burdens of the adult life, the youngest were deeply implicated in the political events of the 20th century

The educational paradox that arose in the years between the World Wars makes the reader aware that despite the reformers' wish to protect the child from the burdens of the adult life, the youngest were deeply implicated in the political events of the 20th century. Trying to help children to recover after the extreme political ideologies of the century and, more importantly, the scars of World War II, designers try to bring the child back to a sort of tabula rasa, the purest manifest of innocence. This is how "good toys" are born in the 50s, all around the war-damaged world. When space exploration became a reality, toys and animation evolved into complex, inventive and fantastic worlds. However, the most recent symbols of our contemporary era show how children's environment have changed dramatically, into a world where aggressive marketing is disguised as sentimental appearances. Therefore, there is a veil of uncertainty in the final chapters of this volume: can childhood be saved from the hostilities of the today's adult world? Can we set nonnegotiable quality standards for the lives of all children?

Children and the consumer society — seen as social entities that represent the sacred and the profane — have influenced each other during the entirety of the 20th century. While the desire of the adults was to come up with new environments, filled with great creative potential for the child, sometimes they seemed to manage to create only a miniature copy of their own world and sins. Century of the Child: Growing by Design 1900-2000 makes you re-think the place of children in our grown-up society. Ultimately, one cannot understand a child without being one. While that means that one should treat a child as one's equal, it also serves as a reminder that every artist, designer and architect is a homo ludens in some way. Roxana Mazilu, masters student at the Milan Polytechnic

Century of the Child: Growing by Design

An extensive, important volume on the many intersections of children and design, this book seeks to advance the scholarly inquiry into the evolving relationship between childhood and design, tracking what co-author Juliet Kinchin calls its "fascinating confluence".

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