Children are the future users, clients and architects of our buildings. What kind of ideas about modern architecture, and what kind of architectural worlds are children exposed to in picture books in their formative years? How have the modern and the urban, the home, the work place, public institutions, and the public realm been represented to children in picture books in Britain since 1945?

Torsten Schmiedeknecht, the 2016 RIBA Research Fund recipient, and his co-author, Emma Hayward, discuss their research into the depiction of post-war housing in British children’s picture books, from 1960 to the present. The two collaborated on “The Representation of Modern Architecture through Illustrations in Post-war British Children’s Literature,” funded by an RIBA Research Fund grant and The School of the Arts, University of Liverpool. The project resulted in the research paper “Absent Architectures,” which is due to be published in issue 24.4 (2019) of The Journal of Architecture, and the exhibition Building Children’s Worlds, which took place during April and May 2019 at RIBA North in Liverpool.