The recurring but sometimes overlooked role of the built environment in children’s literature is on display in “Building Stories,” a new long-term exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
Designed for a multigenerational audience, Building stories offers an immersive exploration of the world of architecture, engineering, construction and design found within the pages of children’s books. The exhibition will encourage visitors of all ages to interact with familiar classics and new favorites through hands-on activities, multimedia installations, drawing, reading and creating their own stories.
Occupying 4,000 square feet of prominent ground floor exhibition space, Building Stories is the most ambitious exhibition the Museum has ever undertaken. It was developed in collaboration with curator Leonard Marcus, the nation’s leading expert on children’s literature, and Portland, Oregon-based exhibition and experiential design studio Plus And Greater Than.
Award-winning authors and illustrators David Macaulay and Oliver Jeffers collaborated at Building Stories to create original environments that provide insight into their creative processes and encourage visitors to better understand the worlds created in the books and foster their role in make a better world
The exhibit will encourage visitors of all ages to interact with familiar classics and new favorites.
Photo courtesy National Building Museum
Building Stories begins with “Building Readers,” an introductory gallery that explores a child’s first experiences of shapes, forms, images, and words as they become.e building blocks of language and the built environment. The many parallels between book and building design are revealed as visitors are invited to consider both the building and book-making process through a selection of rare book dummies, original sketches and architectural models.
Three arches inspired by the Three Little Pigs connect “Edifici lectors” to “Your Home, My Home”, which explores the idea and expression of “home” in its many forms: a bedroom, a house or a neighborhood and community in cultures and communities. locations around the world. An immersive round theater with a multimedia presentation carries books like Tar beach, shade, i The snow day in life.
The third gallery, “Scale Play,” challenges visitors’ perceptions of the environment through another recurring theme in children’s literature: characters change size. It explores how it feels to navigate the world as a child and the impact of monumental architecture on how we see the spaces around us.
The many parallels between the design of the books and the buildings are revealed as visitors Photos courtesy of the National Building Museum “Wider World”, the final gallery of the exhibition, brings together all the concepts of the exhibition to focus on the possibilities of empowerment and participation of children in the real world. The books exhibited inWide Worldexploring the connections between the natural world and man-made systems, and emphasizing characters who use their imaginations and work together to shape their futures, inspiring other young visitors to do the same. “Building Stories” opened in January and will be on display for the next decade. Among the many sponsors of the exhibition are HITT Contracting; DAVIS Construction; Construction DPR; Forsythe Inc.; and AECOM.
