The truth about 9-year-olds regarding architecture is this: They just don’t give two hoots about Georgian Revival or Second Empire or Italianate.
“I’ve been in this field for 15 years,” said Patricia Brown Glenn, a Kansas City art and architectural historian. “I’ve never found a book that children could successfully relate to.”
Glenn hopes she has just filled that gap with “Under Every Roof: A Kids’ Style and Field Guide to the Architecture of American Houses.”
Written by Glenn and illustrated by Kansas City artist Joe Stites, “Under Every Roof” attempts to awaken children to the architectural treasures in their hometowns and across the country by first introducing them to the special features of their homes and the buildings down the street.
“Kids don’t care whether something is Second Empire style,” Glenn observed. “That in itself doesn’t mean anything. What they know is their house, the house their grandparents live in and the houses on their street.
“They need to know, `What does my house look like? My house, my neighborhood, the city I live in-where do they come from? Why were they built?”‘
“Under Every Roof” begins by exploring regional differences: why homes in the desert Southwest generally are made of adobe mud bricks; why houses in the South often feature floor to ceiling windows and wrap-around porches; and why A-frames are frequent in snowy mountain regions.
There are climactic, economic and cultural factors that determine how buildings are structured, the book explains. And then there’s the question of what materials are at hand.
“Houses look different for lots of reasons,” Glenn said. The book explores sod houses and glass houses, shotgun houses and flounder houses, octagonal and geodesic dome homes, brownstones and mobile homes and digs that float.
The second part of “Under Every Roof” addresses that potentially deadening topic of architectural styles: Georgian, Queen Anne and neo-expressionist. But the book’s 170 watercolor illustrations are so engaging, in some cases hilarious, that even the most dedicated Saturday morning cartoon-watcher is likely to be sucked in.
At times, illustrator Joe Stites took such a sassy tone that Glenn thought she’d better call her publisher for approval. “She’d say, `It’s OK-but just barely,”‘ Glenn said.
The page about Frank Lloyd Wright is probably the most irreverent. Above a drawing of the Robie House in Chicago is a series of three small drawings: The first is of a rather conventional two-story house. The second shows a hammer coming down on it. The third panel shows a Wright prairie style home-much, much flatter.
It was difficult for Glenn to gauge what would appeal to a fourth-grader, her target audience. Her son Eliot, who’s now 11, served as her test reader.
“If Eliot said it stayed, it stayed,” she said. “He read it and critiqued it and helped me a great deal. I think what he liked most was the drawings, the way they made the buildings come alive.”
Glenn says she wrote the book “for children to just pick up and enjoy, and for families to take on vacation and explore the built environment in a way that’s not intimidating.”
At the end of the book is a field guide-pictures of various types of roofs, siding materials, floor shapes-to help children explore buildings and put them into a context.
“Under Every Roof” is nothing less than “the book we’ve been waiting for,” said Ginny Graves, director of the Center for Understanding the Built Environment in suburban Kansas City. Graves works with teachers nationwide to promote use of the city in teaching about buildings.
“What makes it different from every other book is that it’s presented with such humor,” she said. “I think that’s what will catch people’s attention.”
Glenn said she hoped that the book, published by Preservation Press (part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation), will cultivate in young readers a lifelong appreciation of architecture and a commitment to protecting important architectural specimens.
Such a broader view develops after children have learned to closely observe where they live, she said.
“If kids buy into the idea that they understand the house and the neighborhood they live in, they start to care about it. They can take on a greater awareness of the city and want to preserve it and honor it.”
