"The Never-Before-Seen Kid City" tells the story of educator Doreen Gehry Nelson who used the intuitive leap of designers, artists, and architects to revolutionize the classroom. Facing the social upheavals of the 1960s, Nelson, then a young teacher working in Los Angeles public schools, responded to a failure of imagination among adults by transforming how she and her colleagues taught. Working with visionary architects, artists, computer scientists, and designers—among them her brother Frank Gehry, Charles and Ray Eames, Claus Oldenburg, Alan Kay, and many others— Nelson pioneered a hands-on methodology in which students become urban planners, problem-solvers, engineers, and engaged citizens. In doing so, she returned learning (and teaching) to the irresistible, rigorous, and meaningful activity that it is.
This book will serve as a practical catalyst for renewed experimentation, vividly brought to life in over two hundred color photographs, many taken by Charles Eames and the Eames Office, many of which have never been published before. New essays by field-leading writers in architecture, design, and education contextualize Nelson’s work with the past and explore how it might shape our future. Doreen Gehry Nelson herself contributes a step-by-step guide for parents at home, teachers in classrooms, community organizers in neighborhoods demonstrating that the most radical educational technology might still be cardboard, glue, and collective imagination.
“I’m not teaching kids to be designers, I’m teaching them to think.”
—Doreen Gehry Nelson