Overview

"Caution! Construction zone ahead! Anyone who has ever stopped to watch a big building going up and who hasn't? will be thrilled by this behind-the-scenes look at an amazing construction project. Put on your hard hat and step inside CONSTRUCTION ZONE! Young readers are invited to come on a virtual tour of a building in progress, led by award-winning photographer Richard Sobol. It takes hundreds of workers, thousands of trucks and machines, and millions of nails and bolts to transform an idea on paper into an actual building in which people will live, play, shop, or work. Every single piece of the construction puzzle big and small must fit together flawlessly. With a clear, direct narrative and handy definitions of construction-related jobs, machines, and terms, Cheryl Willis Hudson distills this most complex of projects into language a young child can grasp. The building itself the Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank O. Gehry is playful and colorful, sculpted to excite, delight, and surprise. Richard Sobol's vivid color photographs capture all the excitement of the busy construction site, while offering a close-up view of its breathtaking genius."""

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9780763626846

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Reviews

The Stata Center...is a building of truly global importance and one of the great cultural artifacts of the early twenty-first century.

With obvious reverence for his project, Sobol's photographs chaperone the young reader through a three-year construction project. The color images are varied in perspective, but each captures the action. The construction zone, Hudson points out, is like a giant puzzle, and together author and photographer, piece by piece, unveil the whole. Each page contains the definition of one or more emboldened words from the text providing for succinct, but copious information. The journey spans architectural plans, excavation, rebar and concrete to insulation and fixtures. Hudson lingers on every person involved, with obvious respect for those who hang from scaffolds or painstakingly lay wire. The finished product, in all its gleaming glory, is an elegantly curved and oddly angled Frank Gehry creation. Advanced for a toddler, but this read will be fascinating for the burgeoning builder. Only the penultimate photograph-of the finished structure-lacks the compositional beauty of the rest, but in every other respect this intriguing project gives an amazingly broad overview of the entire building process. (Nonfiction. 4-7) (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

"CHERYL WILLIS HUDSON is the author of numerous books for children, including the popular AFRO-BETS(r) A B C BOOK, MANY COLORS OF MOTHER GOOSE, and HANDS CAN. She also has more than twenty-five years of experience in graphic design and art direction. In 1988, she and her husband, Wade Hudson, founded Just Us Books, a leading publisher of Black interest titles for young people. ""Working on this book was fascinating and challenging,"" she says of CONSTRUCTION ZONE. ""My job was to help choose the photos and match them with simple words that would explain a very complex process and answer the building' questions that come from a child's point of view. But ultimately, Richard Sobol's expert journalistic eye provided the answers, because each of his photographs tells a wonderful story in itself."" RICHARD SOBOL, whose photographs have appeared in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, TIME, NEWSWEEK, LIFE, OUTSIDE, AUDUBON, WILDLIFE CONSERVATION, and numerous other magazines, has been a photojournalist for more than twenty- five years. For CONSTRUCTION ZONE, he spent three years observing and documenting the construction of MIT's Stata Center, designed by celebrated architect Frank O. Gehry. ""I was usually on the site about twice a week,"" he says. ""I loved walking on the scaffolding, learning to stay sure-footed and stable as buckets of masonry, mud, or lag bolts passed by me."" This is Richard Sobol's first book with Candlewick Press."""

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