Research field
Objects, Design & Architecture
How do things, rooms and built environments shape children’s lives, stories and ways of imagining the world?
Things are never merely background.
Children encounter the world through objects and materials: they handle, arrange, name, transform and imagine with them. Children’s literature records these encounters, while books themselves remain material objects whose formats, textures, images and sequences invite particular kinds of reading.
The field brings material culture into conversation with children’s agency, the life histories of authors and illustrators, and the relations among things, children and books. It also considers the home as a literary setting in which identities take shape, connections are made and boundaries are negotiated in everyday life.
Domestic landscapes, architecture and interior design in picturebooks can make contemporary values, habits and forms of social life visible. They also open imaginative space for reflecting on childhood and education.
Objects & agency
Objects mediate action, memory, desire and play. Their narrative lives invite attention to what children do with things and to what things make possible.
Homes & interiors
Houses, rooms, shelters and thresholds connect intimate experience with social change, family life and the cultural history of childhood.
Visual knowledge
Graphic choices, picturebook formats and tactile devices shape how young readers encounter information, stories and aesthetic experience.
Architecture
Picturebooks offer young readers ways to read houses, cities, design processes and architectural histories through verbal and visual forms.
Bruno Munari, Cappuccetto Giallo. Image © 2016 Bruno Munari.
A central case study
Bruno Munari: books as designed worlds
Munari’s work brings together architecture, graphic experimentation, play and childhood. His picturebooks make rooms, buildings, colour and format active parts of reading, showing how design can communicate social and cultural aspirations to young readers.
Explore the Bruno Munari research fieldCurrent scholarship
Recent work extends the field through the study of object histories, visual educational publishing, graphic design and material approaches to children’s literature.
Research foundations
A continuing bibliography
These publications establish the field’s sustained attention to homes, spatial imagination, book objects, tactility and picturebook architecture.
- Campagnaro, M. (2021). Stepping into the World of Houses. Children’s Picturebooks on Architecture. In N. Goga, S. I. Iversen & A.-S. Teigland (Eds.), Verbal and Visual Strategies in Nonfiction Picturebooks, 202–219.
- Campagnaro, M. (2019). Sull’abitare. Geografie domestiche e visioni di “genere” nei libri per l’infanzia dagli anni Sessanta ad oggi. In G. Zago, C. Callegari & M. Campagnaro (Eds.), La casa, 79–108. Pensa MultiMedia.
- Callegari, C. & Campagnaro, M. (Guest Editors) (2019). Home, Lived-In Spaces and Childhood in European Picturebooks from 1945 to the Present Day. RPD Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica, 14(2), 1–8.
- Campagnaro, M. (2019). A proposito di stanzucce tutte per sé. Evoluzione degli spazi domestici e raffigurazioni visive nella letteratura per l’infanzia. Pedagogia Oggi, 17(1), 171–184.
- Campagnaro, M. (2019). “Narrating” homes and objects: images of domestic life in Italian picturebooks since the mid-20th century. RPD Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica, 14(2), 9–48.
- Zago, G., Callegari, C. & Campagnaro, M. (Eds.) (2019). La casa. Figure, modelli e visioni nella letteratura per l’infanzia dal Novecento ad oggi. Pensa Multimedia.
- Campagnaro, M. (2019). Do touch! How Bruno Munari’s picturebooks work. Rivista di Storia dell’Educazione, 6(1), 81–96.
- Campagnaro, M. (Guest Editor) (2017). Frames for the Body. Spaces and Places in Children’s Literature. Encyclopaideia, 21(49), 3–7.
- Campagnaro, M. (2017). From Palace to House. The Changing Domestic Settings of Fairy-tales. Encyclopaideia, 21(49), 6–28.
Resources
Learn through books, images and lectures.
Architecture & Interior Design in Picturebook
A public lecture by Marnie Campagnaro on architecture and interior design in picturebooks.
Stepping into the World of Houses
Contemporary nonfiction picturebooks on houses and architecture, with a taxonomy of their narrative solutions.
Paesaggi d’infanzia
Literary landscapes, ecological imaginaries and the history of childhood through an interdisciplinary lens.