“It’s a fun book because while the parent can read, the kid can look around for stuff,” says my nine-year-old daughter, Sonia, to whom I read the book. That’s all you need to know about What’s That Building?: An Architectural Guessing Game if you’re a design-aware parent and your offspring have shown an aptitude for building in Minecraft.
Each building in the book is one that children are likely to encounter in their lived experience and has a designated purpose—an aquarium, an airport, a museum, and a planetarium. Buildings children may use daily are well-represented, including a school, a library, a shopping mall, and a bakery—to name some.
There are whimsical additions to the illustrations. These details make the picture-hunt for the architect—the overt aim of the Where’s Waldo experience—delightfully surreal. See if you can find a cat eating sushi, a dog driving a toy train, a bear boarding a plane, and a bird working at a bakery. None of these are referred to in the text, which stays firmly grounded in reality.
So while parents can feel good knowing they are reading to their kids from a constructive source, kids can feel good exploring the illustrations. They kept Sonia’s attention long enough for her to absorb the book’s main claim: that buildings designed for different purposes will look different by design. No small feat in thirty-two pages, as my daughter—like many nine-year-olds—thinks she knows everything.
“Buildings look different because different people designed them, and everyone has their own taste,” was her initial reaction to the book. But by the end, I could see that the illustrations showing how the buildings are used had changed her view.
One niggling point to consider is the glossary, where both aerator and story (a floor of a building) appear as entries. There are 15 terms, but there seems to be no overarching criterion that unifies them in terms of language graded for primary school children. It’s worth noting, however, that the glossary is the exception.
Elsewhere in What’s That Building?, the vocabulary and sentence variety have clearly been levelled so that a primary-school-age child should have no difficulty understanding the words and can focus instead on the ideas. Put another way, if a design is a plan for a solution to a problem, the book succeeds in helping my daughter to see that buildings are shaped by more than taste and style—they are shaped by how people are expected to use them.
What’s That Building? makes it far easier to get the point across that buildings, like clothes, differ according to needs. It would have been tough otherwise. Sonia is the kind of child who says, “Who would wanna live in Los Angeles? It burns every year,” and means it.
