Building Childrens Worlds

"Architecture is frequently overlooked as a background in picturebook research. However, the field of childrens literature has increasingly focused on architectural spaces and environments in picturebooks as a result of the spatial turn and the pictorial turn. Yet there are still relatively few studies specialising in the architecture of childrens picturebooks. Building Childrens Worlds: The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks is groundbreaking in this field, employing various research methodologies to present a diverse architectural world in childrens picturebooks that is closely related to history, culture, ideology, and emotion. The collection encourages further exploration of architecture and childrens literature and will undoubtedly appeal to all those interested in modern architecture and modernity in childrens picturebooks." Manle Li and Haifeng Hui, International Research in Childrens Literature, May 2024

Torsten Schmiedeknecht is a Reader in Architecture at the University of Liverpool. His research interests include the representation of architecture in print media, rationalism in architecture and architectural competitions. He is the co-editor of Modernism and the Professional Architecture Journal, The Rationalist Reader, Rationalist Traces, An Architects Guide to Fame and Fame and Architecture. In 2016 he was the recipient of an RIBA Research Trust Award for his project The representation of Modern Architecture through illustrations in postwar British Childrens Literature, which resulted in a co-authored paper (Absent Architectures: Post-War Housing in British Childrens Picture Books) with Emma Hayward, and the exhibition Building Childrens Worlds at RIBA North in Liverpool in Spring 2019. Jill Rudd is a Professor of Literature in the English Department at the University of Liverpool, where, amongst other things, she teaches medieval literature and childrens literature. Chiefly a medievalist with an interest in eco-criticism, her publications include Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature (MUP, 2007) and various articles and chapters on mice, clouds, flowers and plants. She has also written on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Secret Garden and in the past, on Charlotte Perkins Gilmans short stories. She has supervised postgraduate theses on issue-led childrens literature written for older children readers and young adults. Emma Hayward is a secondary school English teacher and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include curriculum design and 20th- and 21st-century literature in particular, the relationship between literature and the built environment, verbal-visual narratives and postmodernism/late postmodernism. She has published on childrens literature and the built environment. Her publications include Absent Architectures: Post-War Housing in British Childrens Picture Books, 1960-present and "Horrible muddy English places": Downriver, Swandown, and the Mock-Heroic Tradition.

Introduction Part 1: Modernity 1.Building for the future - Children as future citizens in Swedish Picturebooks of the 1930s 2. A Modern Utopia: Architecture, Modernity and Ladybird Books in postwar Britain 3. Reading as Building: Modernist Architecture and Book Space in Picturebooks 4. Representations of modern architecture and urbanism in Colombian children's literature from the mid-20th century Part 2: Domestic Space 5. Domestic Architecture and Environmental Design in Australian Picture Books 6. The house, where everything begins 7. Architecture and Interior Design in Italian Picturebooks: A case study of Bruno Munari 8. Representations of architecture in childrens picture books in Australia, Singapore and China 9. Building Diversity in British and American Childrens Picturebooks (2000-present) Part 3: Urban Space 10. Highly Modern Ideal Homestead 11. Architecture and Magic: Mapping the London of Childrens Fantasy Fiction 12. Ordinary cityscapes and architecture in Jrg Mllers picturebook oeuvre