Come on in, come on in.

Come on.

For me, everything starts with the pencil.

The pencil is the application of the thought to the paper.

So you start just fooling around with a direction.

And once you see the direction, you begin to see that this could work in this space.

Then the idea begins to develop to be able to be functional and built.

I'm dealing with a glass, steel, water, and light.

So all of the senses can be experienced: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling.

There's never a boring moment.

That's the beauty of being an artist.

I've got a lot of different ideas going all the time.

I'll be working on something for 40 minutes and then I go to something else.

It's just my nature.

John is like an overgrown eight year old.

It's either full speed ahead or stop.

Nothing in between.

I remember my first week in kindergarten we did drawing, we did cutting things out.

We were just having fun as kids.

Friedrich Fröbel was the inventor of kindergarten.

In the '70s and '80s, I spent time studying his work.

Fröbel was born in Germany.

His father was a Lutheran minister.

In university, he studied botany, mathematics and he was an apprentice of Samuel Weiss at the Museum of Crystallography.

Samuel Weiss was one of the discoverers of how crystalline structure develops.

The drawings of Samuel Weiss show how the cube grew to the other crystalline forms.

After having an education in sciences, Fröbel worked as a teacher.

That changed the rest of his life.

You know, as a little kid, I wanted to be an architect.

But in college, architecture was mathematics so I got into majoring in art.

I started working in clay.

I loved the feeling of the, you know how you could manipulate it.

So I got a master's in ceramics.

And then that's when I went to Europe.

I was working with the Queens Royal Blue Delft Company.

They established a factory in Delft in 1653.

We built ceramic murals, some that were 50-by-150 feet.

In the Netherlands, I also worked with Leerdam Glass.

I saw transparency, translucency and all those qualities of glass that everything else in the sculptural world did not have.

I was kind of wooed into that glass world and I said, I gotta do this.

The educational system pre-1800 was rote learning strict discipline.

The teachers were dictators.

And then, Fröbel published his philosophy in 1826.

For him, the kinder is the child.

The garden is for planting things and growing.

So within the mind of the child, that seed would grow.

And he helped nurture that growth with his kindergarten teaching system, which is based on the crystalline structure concept from Samuel Weiss.

Cube, cylinder, and the sphere.

By spinning this cube, it becomes a cylinder.

And this one, when you spin this cylinder, it becomes a sphere.

Fröbel began to break it down into its elements.

The solid cube becomes a fragmented cube.

The children begin to arrange it in the different ideas.

So this is the gift of knowledge.

Like mathematics, halves, quarters the gift of beauty is to take the shapes and to arrange them into any kind of a pattern and the gift of life, the children create buildings out of blocks, chairs out of blocks.

After the block system, they play with parquetries, paper cutting, paper folding, peas and sticks.

So Fröbel was presenting objects for the children to learn through sense perception experiential contact with the world.

When I got back to America, I didn't have a job but I found a teaching position in L.A. and I liked it because it was fun.

My approach to teaching is actually Fröbel derivative because it deals with opening up freedom of expression and freedom of feelings, but in order to express that freedom, you have to have the techniques.

And I always felt that you must understand your media in order to create anything.

I made a series of small blown forms.

I played with this idea.

I thought, that's kind of cool, that's fun.

But once I took this apart and I looked at this form, I saw it standing 10 feet tall.

Now in order to make that ten feet tall, you have to have furnaces that are big enough to be able to put the glass in to bend it.

So I built a walk-in kiln.

You start with a flat piece of glass and you put it into the kiln, suspend it over the mold.

We used steel pipes.

We run that up to a temperature of about 1100 degrees, 14 to 16 hours, to get to the bending point.

Then the cooling takes three to four days.

Once those pieces are bent in the large kiln, then we transfer those to the taping table.

He does all that taping single handedly, freehand, and they're perfect.

From the taping process, I wheel them into the sandblast booth.

Once the piece is sandblasted, the surface is etched, then we bring it in the studio, remove all the tape.

So the pattern then is finished.

In 1817, Fröbel built a school in Keilhau.

And then in 1837, kindergarten in Bad Blankenburg, which is over the hill, and he would hike back and forth.

It's about nine miles.

From there, Fröbel's system spread around Germany and then around the world: England, Japan, Russia, the USA.

Can you open the door and put your finger in?

I opened it.

What can we do with these blocks?

The Fröbel system was kind of lost in the mid-20th century.

But it's really coming back.

Fröbel USA is trying to get this into the kindergarten system today.

I made a rocket ship.

I made a square rocket ship.

Three, two, one, blast off.

It's the rebirth of freedom in education.

Now, this is controversial, but Fröbel's kindergarten is the origin of modern abstract art.

Children learning that system became 20th century painters, sculptors, designers.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, in 1876 my mother went to the Philadelphia World's Fair and saw the presentation of the kindergarten system.

And he says, when my mother introduced these blocks to me, they changed the way I saw the world.

Piet Mondrian began as a teacher.

So he knew the Fröbel system.

I think that he integrated that totally into his work.

Another perfect example is Buckminster Fuller.

He said, I discovered my geometric structures, my geodesic domes from Fröbel's peas and sticks.

Goldi and I went to Germany in 2019.

We went to his birthplace.

We went to where his schools were.

John's got Fröbel on the brain.

So, we tracked the Fröbel trail and went up the hill.

And on the top is a monument to him the cube, the cylinder, and the sphere.

10 feet tall, almost.

I'm getting goose pimples now because it was just something, this really exists.

Go ahead, go ahead, you're up, we got it, we got it, go up.

Perfect, perfect, perfect.

I learned so much about life from Fröbel.

His ideas connected me to a whole new world.

A visual world.