Have you ever felt squashed? Squeezed? Pulled? Tugged? If so, then you know what it feels like to be a building! Here, with playful drawings and humorous text, award-winning author Forrest Wilson uses human figures (plus some dogs and rams) to show that architecture and people have more in common than you might have believed. This book will delight everyone who is fascinated with the buildings around us.

Review

What does it feel like to be a building? Well, if you are a colurrm, "it feels like squash." And "it feels like multiple squash to be a wall, because being wider and longer than a column, a wall carries more of the building's weight to the ground." It feels like "squeeze" to be an arch and "brace"to be a buttress. In this children's book (ages seven and older), buildings are composed of little men who are squashed and squeezed, all in the service of architecture. The author, who has written extensively about building technology, wants his young readers to understand "building body language." "You feel gravity, wind, sun, and rain. Buildings feel the same stresses and strains that people do." This is an excellent idea, but this book is frequently confusing. Some of the sentences are likely to leave an adult reader puzzled and more than a few of the illustrations are hard to decipher. When the books works, it creates an image that explains a complex idea: A ram acts as a buttress, and a rain with wings is a flying buttress. One hesitates to criticize any book on architecture for children. There are so very few. But this book was first published in 1969, and since that time the work of David Macaulay (Castle, Cathedral, Underground, etc.) has set the standard for children's architecture books. By that standard, What It Feels Like To Be a Building, seems rudimentary. Still many readers will be charmed by this worthy book. -- From Independent Publisher

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