What Adults Don’t Know About Architecture: Inspiring young minds to build a more beautiful world

What Adults Don’t Know About Architecture: Inspiring young minds to build a more beautiful world
Age Range
9+
Release Date
May 11, 2021
ISBN
978-1912891306
Buy This Book
      

Children are rarely introduced properly to architecture, but there are in fact few subjects more important―because the quality of the architecture that surrounds us has such an impact on our mood and sense of well-being.

The bitter truth is that in modern times we’ve built a world that’s far too often ugly or charmless―and we’ve done so because very few people ever feel they have the right to comment on what gets built around them. This is a chance for the next generation to develop the tools to talk about architecture with confidence, knowledge, and passion. It tells us about what a satisfying building is, what makes a street enticing (or not), why some cities are charming and others repel us―and how we might build going forward in a way that will reliably delight and uplift us.

This engaging guide is designed to help children (and their favorite adults) to understand how buildings work and how we might create the better looking world we all crave and deserve.

Children are rarely introduced properly to architecture, but there are in fact few subjects more important―because the quality of the architecture that surrounds us has such an impact on our mood and sense of well-being.

The bitter truth is that in modern times we’ve built a world that’s far too often ugly or charmless―and we’ve done so because very few people ever feel they have the right to comment on what gets built around them. This is a chance for the next generation to develop the tools to talk about architecture with confidence, knowledge, and passion. It tells us about what a satisfying building is, what makes a street enticing (or not), why some cities are charming and others repel us―and how we might build going forward in a way that will reliably delight and uplift us.

This engaging guide is designed to help children (and their favorite adults) to understand how buildings work and how we might create the better looking world we all crave and deserve.

Editor review

1 review
Unique Architectural Overview
Overall rating
 
4.0
Writing Style
 
3.0
Illustrations/Photos (if applicable)
 
5.0
Learning Value
 
4.0
This book is an interesting overview of a variety of architecture, although the vast majority of it is from western Europe. Divided into two main parts, this takes young readers through a very conversational introduction to architecture and then introduces them to ways "How to Build a Beautiful City". There are plentiful examples of color photographs of buildings, and readers are often prompted for their thoughts, but then told what they should be thinking. This is more of a coffee table type book (although the trim size is that of a novel), and lacks an index.
Good Points
I'm a huge architecture geek, and my children frequently text me pictures of buildings they see and ask me to give them approximate dates of when they might have been constructed. I like the idea of showing young readers a variety of buildings and having them think about whether they are well designed. This book would have been HUGELY useful to the architects who redecorated my school library ten years ago, who didn't really think about form following function. In fact, my favorite part of the whole book was the assertion that much architecture is not very pleasing because architects are more worried about impressing other architects than about designing good buildings.

Middle school students are often given assignments to design a town or an island and incorporate elements of units they are studying, so I really enjoyed the sections on what constitutes a good city and think it might be very useful. There are so many places in the US where architects have not scaled things to human size, developed local style, or made the area lively for pedestrians, so they could certainly use this book. On the down side, anything outside of the western European cannon is seen as exotic, and the idea of "beauty" is a bit narrow and comes across as rather judgmental.

Taken with a grain of salt, this is an interesting and quick read. Since there are so few books about architecture for young readers (other than David MacCauley's wonderful works like City), this fills a lacuna in nonfiction literature for children.
Report this review Comments (0) | Was this review helpful? 1 0

User reviews

There are no user reviews for this listing.
Already have an account? or Create an account

Latest Additions