MINI ARCHITECTS

Crafts projects made from simple materials echo aspects of iconic structures from Stonehenge and the Sagrada Família to a Zen garden.

Confusingly switching from addressing children in some passages to adult caregivers in others, Seblon opens each entry with a description of the chosen structure alongside a not-always-helpfully angled photo. She adds several discussion questions, then goes on to pair terse instructions with photos or diagrams of the neatly assembled project at successive stages. The “little hands” (as she puts it) that are visible in some pictures will generally need help from adult hands to finish most of these projects—the rounded river pebbles prescribed for Stonehenge, for example, will be hard to balance atop one another, and the cardboard walls for the “Tower block box” inspired by Le Corbusier’s brutalist Cité Radieuse (“Radiant City”) will require more than the suggested safety scissors. Several will also require waiting for paint, glue, or papier-mâché to dry partway through before they can be finished off. Still, even if many of the completed models don’t resemble the buildings that supposedly inspired them, they will require enough effort to satisfy hands-on builders, and more than a few could potentially exhibit spectacular forms and colors. The skin hues of photographed hands and Sae-Heng’s small figures of painted children are diverse.

Uneven but worthwhile.