Creative Playthings

“Play has a basic role in the drama of a child’s development. It is a serious business for the child, his true means of learning and growing…Every child should have a wide variety of play materials to evoke in him a spirit of inquiry; to develop physical manipulation to the fullest; to stimulate creative expression. He requires not only the miniatures of real objects in the adult world, but also building blocks, clay, finger paints, et cetera, that he can adapt to his particular needs.”

-Frank Caplan, 1949, Founder of Creative Playthings

Creative Playthings was founded in NYC by Frank and Theresa Caplan in 1945.  Their goal was to create educational toys and materials that were simple but beautiful, the sorts of playthings that would promote a child’s creativity and imagination.

Caplan believed that providing unpainted abstract forms that emphasized shape, color and texture, as opposed to life-like details, would stimulate a child’s imagination.  So he began to make his own forms, right in the store on 95th street, that could be manipulated and rearranged into all sorts of different combinations and and structures.

Beginning in 1949, Creative Playthings embarked on a series of collaborations with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. In 1949, the children’s room and playroom of Marcel Breuer’s “House in the Museum Garden” was composed almost entirely of Creative Playthings objects and designs, including their “Hollow Blocks.” After that Caplan worked with such notable artists, architects, and designers as Isamu Noguchi, Louis Kahn, Henry Moore, and Robert Winston on comprehensive playground designs (although some of these designs were not fully realized). He also collaborated with numerous international artists to design playground equipment, such as the Swedish sculptor, Egon Möller-Nielsen’s fiberglass helical slide

Later followed a close collaboration with Swiss toymaker Antonio Vitali to design a series of “Playforms” – smooth sculpted animals, vehicles, and figures in wood that fit neatly into a child’s hands. Each object is more beautiful than the next!

In 1966 the company was bought by, and then later sold again in the 80s, and it was never really the same again. But they had a pretty spectacular run there for nearly two decades! Why can’t children’s toys still look this good?!

The Whimsical Creations of Libuše Niklová

When you think of Czechoslovakia, I’ll bet toys don’t come to mind; you most likely think of communism, or maybe one of the ex-country’s Olympic athletes, perhaps your mouth waters at the thought of delicious Czech schnitzel, but I can almost guarantee that you don’t think of toys … unlessyou are familiar with the name Libuše Niklová (1934-1981).

Niklová revolutionized industrial toy design beginning in the 1950s with simple, sometimes surreal animal forms in rubber and plastic.

One of Niklova’s most famous creations is the cat with the accordion body, which dates back to 1963.  Libuše Niklová saw the employees in the Fatra Napajedla factory developing a new toilet flush system that used a special accordion tube.  In this way the accordion cat was born!  Not only could you squeeze the tube body, but you could also make it move in all sorts of ways, which was pretty revolutionary at the time.  The cat was the first one of the tube collection, which consists of 11 toys in all – ten animals and one baby.

There is a show up in Paris on the works of Niklova titled “Plastique Ludique.”  It will be at the Musee de Arts Decoratifs, until November 6th, 2011, but just in case you can’t make it to France for the show, check out the book Gift Set – Toys and Monographs from Libuse Niklova!

The World of Bruno Munari

Today will be dedicated to the visually stunning creations of Bruno Munari (1907 – 1998).  For those of you who are not familiar with him, Munari was an Italian artist and designer with wide-ranging skills.  He worked as a painter, sculptor, and industrial designer; he was a graphic artist and filmmaker, a writer and a poet.  Munari believed in the power of simple design to stimulate the imagination.

Bruno Munari had a son, Alberto, who inspired him to begin creating children’s materials. Munari was interested in the interrelationship between games, creativity and childhood. For this reason, he strove to create children’s materials that would support the maintenance of the young mind’s elasticity and point of view.  Munari did not believe in the inherent value of fantastical stories of princes and princesses, or dragons and monsters; instead, he wanted to create simple stories about people, animals, and plants that awaken the senses. Books with basic story lines and a humorous twist, brought to life by simple, colorful illustrations drawn with clarity and precision.

With this mission in mind, Munari wrote the nine children’s books mentioned below.  In addition, he created other “pre-books,” to inspire  a love of reading in pre-literate minds.  These were stories that could not be communicated with words, that were expressed instead in visual, and tactile terms.  For these works he won the Andersen award for Best Children’s Author in 1974, a graphic award in the Bologna Fair for the childhood  in 1984, and a Lego award for his exceptional contributions on the development on creativity of children in 1986.