A Children’s Book About Architecture

God’s Very Good Ideas

And People Who Used God’s Good Ideas for Making Buildings

(Too advanced for first-graders? Don’t underestimate them!)



This is a picture of a place in Ireland. It is called the “Giant’s Causeway.” Causeway is a word that means bridge. The rocks that you see in the picture came up out of the ground from a volcano. When the hot rocks cooled down they split into shapes that have six sides. Shapes that have six sides are called “hexagons.” Using hexagons is a good way to build things. Bees make their honeycombs out of hexagons. If you ever see any old sidewalks in Atlanta, Georgia you will find out that they are also made out of hexagons. These shapes fit together perfectly, so there is no wasted space in between them.



Hexagons are a good shape to use for buildings because you can make big rooms without using much wood, stone, or metal. A man named Frank Lloyd Wright decided to use hexagons to plan a house for the Hanna family. This picture is the floor plan of the Hanna House. Can you see the hexagons in it? It cost a little more to build than most houses because it built in a way that was unusual, but the Hannas did not mind paying the extra money. They wanted a house that was not like just every other house.



This is a picture of the inside of the Hanna house. Mr. and Mrs. Hanna were teachers. They wanted a big room where their own children could learn and play. The man who built the house for them told him that when he was a little boy he used to play with wood blocks. The builder’s mother knew that using blocks was a good way for children to learn about shapes. Playing with blocks as a child was what made him want to be a builder. The Hannas liked this idea, so they got some wood blocks for their own children to play with. You can see the blocks that their children played with at the right side of this picture.





Turtles live in the water, but tortoises live on land. Tortoises do not have to build tortoise houses. God gave them a nice house they carry around with them. It is called a shell. It is very strong. A shell is so strong that it can keep the tortoise safe when other animals try to harm it. The round shape of the shell is part of the reason that it is so strong. A tortoise shell is shaped like half of an eggshell, but it is not as easy to break as an egg. The shell is much thicker than an eggshell. Before people used plastic to make things like eyeglass frames and pocket combs, they used tortoise shell.



There once was a builder from a country called Finland. His name was Eero Saarinen. He liked to look at nature when he was a little boy. His father was a builder, so Eero wanted to be a builder too when he grew up. When he was older, Eero once planned a building that looked just like a big bird getting ready to fly away. This building was for an airport, so making it look like a bird was a very good idea. He had another good idea when a school named Yale told him that they needed a building to play hockey in. The builder thought of the strong shells of tortoises. The floor plan that he drew is shaped like a tortoise. You can see in the picture above that it looks like the outline of a tortoise.



The outside of the building that is used for playing hockey also looks like a tortoise shell. The big arch that runs down the middle of it is what holds up the rest of the roof. The builder from Finland was very happy with the strength of this big arch. He wondered what it would be like to build an even bigger arch. He found out when the City of Saint Louis asked him to build an arch for them that was over 600 feet tall. It was taller than the Washington Monument!





God likes round things. A circle is the best way to put a fence around the biggest amount of land with the smallest amount of fence. God always knows the best way to do something, so God knows a circle is a good shape to use. Many objects in nature are shaped like circles. If you cut a round fruit through its middle, the end of each half looks like a circle.  The picture above is of the inside of a sliced Kiwi fruit. The lines that you see in the Kiwi fruit all start in the center of the circle. They go straight from the center to the outside, and are nice to look at.



A builder named Jim Roberts once lived in a large English city named Birmingham. His job was to each other people how to build things, but he also built many things himself. He knew what a good and useful shape the circle is. He decided to copy nature when he was making the floor plan for an apartment building that many people would call home. He may never have seen the inside of a Kiwi fruit, but the plan that he made looks like the inside of many types of fruits. A grapefruit half looks just like the floor plan for Mr. Robert’s apartment building which is shown in the picture above. Because the building is shaped like a circle, it can house many people inside of it without using a lot of glass or steel to build the outside wall.



Since the plan of the building that Jim Roberts was a circle, all of the circle-shaped floors piled on top of each other made the entire building looked like the cardboard tube that is in the middle of a roll of paper towels. The fancy name for this kind of shape is “cylinder.” The trunk of a tree is shaped like a cylinder. The building in the picture above looks just like a giant tree trunk that has had its top cut off. You can tell that this building is in England because you can see a double-decker bus on the street in front of it. England is the only country in the world that uses this kind of bus. It can carry twice as many people as the buses that are used in the United States!




One of God’s most beautiful creations is the shell of a Nautilus. This is a picture of the inside of a Nautilus shell. These shells are shaped just like snail shells, but Nautiluses live deep beneath the sea, and not on dry land the way that snails do. This shape of a Nautilus is called a “spiral.” When snails and Nautiluses grow bigger, new parts get added to the shell. The sizes of the new parts and the old parts follow a plan that God made. It is a very special plan that makes a beautiful spiral shell.



A builder in a part of Europe that is called Estonia wanted to draw a plan for a building that looked just like a snail or Nautilus shell. Estonia is located right beside the ocean, so the people who live there have seen Nautilus shells before. The curly shape of a Nautilus shell is called a “spiral.” Spirals are not as good a way to plan a building as squares, hexagons, or circles, but they are still a good idea. Just like the shell of a snail, the little rooms of the apartments in this building are in the narrow parts of the spiral. The biggest rooms are located in the wide parts of the spiral. The curved walls that separate the apartments from the hallways are almost solid from the ground to the roof, and even stick up above the roof of the building. This helps to strengthen the building.



This is a picture of the outside of building in Estonia that is shaped like a spiral. Because it looks like a snail shell, it has been nicknamed the “Snail Tower.” The way that the spiral-shaped walls stick up above the building and then twist around looks just like a painting of the Tower of Babel by a famous Dutch artist. The tower was built by two natives of Estonia named Kunnapu and Padrik, but the spiral that it is made from is one of God’s good ideas. It would be fun to live inside of the “Snail Tower!”




When the round things that God likes are made of many spirals all gathered together, it makes a very pretty pattern. Many plants have spiral patterns for way that their leaves and branches are arranged on the stem. Some have spiral shapes inside of their flowers. The picture above is of the center of a sunflower. The way that God has placed the seeds in the sunflower looks like many spirals all joined together. This pattern is one of the best ways to get as many seeds inside of a circle as possible. These seeds all touch each other, and this makes the pattern very strong. If the seeds were all glued together it would be very hard to pull them apart!



A man named Buckminster Fuller once looked at some of the patterns in the plants that God created. He used geometry to describe these patterns. He thought that they would be good to use for making buildings. The pattern that he used for the roof of his first big building is shown in the picture above. A drawing of this pattern was sent to the government. Mr. Fuller told the government that he had invented this pattern, and that anyone who used the pattern for their own buildings had to pay him money for using his idea. But this pattern was not invented by Mr. Fuller. It was invented by God. This pattern, and others like it, are used to build what Buckminster Fuller called a “geodesic dome.”



This is a picture of the outside of the first geodesic dome that was ever built. It was called the “Union Tank Car Dome.” It was built almost sixty years ago, way back in 1958. It covered what was, at that time, the biggest room that had ever built. Even though it was so big, it did not cost very much money to build it. Many more geodesic domes were built after this first one. The man who said that he invented it, Buckminster Fuller, became very famous because of these domes, but you should remember that the real inventor of the special patterns that were used to make these domes is God.

The  first geodesic dome has been torn down. This is a shame, because there was not really anything wrong with it. It was built in the bayous of Louisiana, very far from where people could easily get to it. It was so big that no one knew what to do with it.  An even bigger dome was built years later. The city that built it needed a way to keep the rain and the sun off of people who were watching football games. The name of this building is the “Houston Astrodome.” The grass on a football field needs rain and sun to stay healthy, but the dome that was built over the football field in Houston kept the grass from getting any rain or sun. They decided to use fake grass instead. They called this fake grass “Astroturf,” but it is not nearly as good as the grass that God created!

God is good at geometry, because He invented geometry!