Architects and designers can be inspired by all kinds of things!
On page 51, Calder is inspired by his pentominoes to design classroom furniture and playground equipment using pentomino shapes.
Architect Frank Gehry says that his designs have been inspired by the form and texture of a fish. This is connected to childhood memories of his grandmother’s purchase of a carp at the fish market. She took the fish home in a paper container filled with water and put it in a bathtub, where young Frank would watch it swim. (For discussion purposes, you can access images of his Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis by going to www.weisman.umn.edu/architecture/images.html)
When Frank Lloyd Wright was a boy, he played with Froebel blocks. These German toys inspired him to see objects in a different way- as arrangements of geometry and shapes. His work, particularly in stained glass and graphic design, displays his abstraction of real things into geometry shapes.
Click on the four “Abstract Images” in the sidebar under Frequently Used Resources. Can you see the objects that Wright was trying to abstract? Discuss the concepts of “inspiration” and “abstraction”and how Wright’s simple geometric forms both resemble and not resemble the “real thing.”
Have students try their hand at abstract design. Choose an image of a natural landscape from a magazine and instruct students to redraw the image with only these shapes: curve, circle, triangle, rectangle, and square. If you want to make the challenge more difficult, ask students to add a human figure “to scale” in the design, so that the figure is proportionate to the scale of the landscape. Scan a design and upload it to the site. Or, you can send it to us by mail.
