Iggy Peck's Big Project Book for Amazing Architects by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts
| Iggy Peck's Big Project Book for Amazing Architects by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts | |
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| Category: Children's Non-Fiction | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A book that is perfect for the budding young architect – you'll be tasked with drawing a veritable city of buildings on these pages. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? No |
| Pages: 96 | Date: August 2017 |
| Publisher: Abrams | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781419718922 | |
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Out of all the things I wanted to be as a child, an architect was not one of them. Which is a shame, perhaps – I might have had a few Prince Charles-friendly ideas under my belt, and even if I hadn't exactly progressed at that I might have been more at ease at those stupid team-bonding 'build-a-this-or-that' exercises you are sometimes forced to undergo as an adult. I never knew I would ever hold any importance in my ability to draw buildings, conceptualise towns and create model structures of my own creations – partly because I knew I had no ability. But for the likes of Iggy Peck, the whole idea is never in doubt – he spends his entire time thinking of buildings and how to improve on the ones he knows. And so, for the duration of your engagement with these pages, will you.
And methinks you'll be stuck here quite a long time. Beyond the initial short introduction to Iggy and his interest, we get the same safety warnings and equipment list as we had in this book's sister volume, and then we're off, jumping in right at the deep end by checking out balance, rhythm, contrast and unity in building facades, and drawing our own examples. And that's the light work out of the way – soon we've come to invent a whole town's worth of civic buildings and factories, and lain the whole thing out with waterways, green fields and so on; we've invented multi-tasking hobby rooms; and drawn up everything from a gargoyle to a Martian colony.
These are all tasks I would not find easy – and said team-building exercises regardless, I would not know where to begin with building a bridge out of dried spaghetti and marshmallows. Many times we get a vague outline of spurious ingredients our Iggy may have used for a marvellous creation – and told to replicate it ourselves, which begs the question that if Iggy is such a wonderfully inventive architect at such a young age, how the heck are we supposed to compete?
This is a large format book, and there aren't that many pages in it, but when nearly every one demands a drawing or some similar scheme from us, I'm sure it would be many hours before you're done to any competence or satisfaction. I was actually glad when a quiz or a little bit of background to the world's existing architecture interrupted the crafting – although I found there was not enough of these, and remain convinced the best approach to this is to have some prior knowledge and/or parental nudging. Yet obviously the book is also a wonderful trainer for the young mind – several times it mentions real world problems, and asks for sustainable homes, immediate refugee relief accommodation, and suchlike, so we engage with the industry and design of architecture by looking at short-term future needs. But my main issue remains with the fact that I didn't want to be an architect, and I don't recall any of my classmates ever wanting to be one. I doubt very much any of them ever had the ability to 'win' at this book, and to successfully imagine something for every task. So while this is a wonderful item that never lets the budding young builder rest on her or his laurels, I think the publishers have an equally Sisyphean task in finding enough children to get to the end of this volume.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Rosie Revere's Big Project Book for Bold Engineers by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts is the sister book, which had a more successfully varied list of missions, and which also took you away from the page to work in other ways more often than the volume at hand.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Iggy Peck's Big Project Book for Amazing Architects by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts at Amazon.com.
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