Isabel Hill

What a fun little picture-book! With simple, rhyming text and colorful photographs, Isabel Hill highlights the many architectural animals to be found on the buildings of New York City: "Come to the city and you will find, / animals, animals of every kind. / Walking the streets is like visiting a zoo, / but the animals are on buildings, so come find a few."

Donkeys that form a decorative metal grille, dogs carved into a stone column, bunnies looking out from a cornice line, elephants holding up flagpoles: each example highlights a different architectural element or style, all defined at the rear of the book. Also at the rear is a list of locations, so enterprising young New Yorkers can track down these urban animals, if they so choose! Educational and fun, Urban Animals will appeal to kids who are interested in architecture, who love animals, or who just like to notice the details.… (mehr)

Louis Sullivan is famous for saying “Form follows function”. This upcoming book is a look at the stories that buildings can tell us. By looking at the different decorations adorning buildings, Hill shows kids that they can tell a good deal about a building, just by looking at the outside.


Buildings are like books with stories that last.
They tell us about our present and also our past.

The outside of a building says quite a lot.
About setting, about character, and even about plot.

Each two-page fold is mostly photographs of a particular building, with a rhyming couplet explaining the building and its purpose. Also included are some historical photos from inside the building of various workers at their tasks or consumers enjoying the building.

This is an entertaining introduction to architecture for young children, but is definitely of the read-aloud category. Some of the vocabulary is beyond the picture book age group (i.e., hydrant, monumental, unique). There is also a ‘Characters and Plots’ section in the back of the book that gives more information on the buildings described. It’s a little bit heavier text-wise, so I don’t know how many kids will stick around for it; they might be better served by including this information on the original pages.

I hope that Hill follows this up with an update that takes it a little further afield. All of the buildings included are historical works in New York City. After all, Frank LLoyd Wright updated Sullivan: “Form ever follows function and environment.”… (mehr)