Architecture and Interior Design in Italian Picturebooks. A case study of Bruno Munari

The home and its architecture represent a setting in children’s literature where identities are shaped, connections are established, and boundaries are defined in one’s daily interactions with the world. The home includes both centripetal forces (when the home is intended as a protected and intimate nest) and centrifugal forces (when the home is intended as the starting point of new adventures and as the point of departure from a violent and oppressive family). The idea of the home as a domestic hearth was first conceptualised and codified in the 19th century. However, it was only in the 20th century that the home assumed its central role in reflecting the evolution of certain social identities and new lifestyles, which continue to develop up to the present day. These developments inevitably had impacts on children’s books. The imposing and often inhospitable dwellings described in some classical novels of the 19th century, such as the stories by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and Carlo Collodi, were followed—in the early 20th century and in the aftermath of World War II—by a mushrooming of little fictional homes that seemed to fit perfectly the lives of their inhabitants. Some international examples include the home in Little House on the Prairie (1935), a reminiscence of a family’s stay in US Indian Territory; the naïve Pippi Longstocking’s house, Villa Villekulla (1945); the arboreal retreat of The Baron in the Trees (1957); the hostile Dakota’s ‘White Flats’ (1988); and the threatening parallel house in the novel Coraline (2003). This same literary richness is also present in picturebooks, which often portray homes through their intimate, lively rooms and their soft beds, warm dishes, steaming mugs, crackling fireplaces, snug sofas and bursting bookshelves. The characters are at home in a regenerating space that reflects their identities, behaviours, inclinations and values (Campagnaro, 2019a; Goga, 2019; Kümmerling-Meibauer, 2019; Narančić-Kovač, 2019; Ramos, 2019). However, not only positive representations of the home are depicted in picturebooks but also but also negative ones as walls, windows, doors and ceilings can convey the protagonist’s feelings of disempowerment or imprisonment, as, for instance, in Armin Greder’s The City (2010). Inside their houses, characters not only eat, sleep, play with friends and interact with their parents but also internalise identity bonds and the cultural and social bonds of their communities. Architectural layout, furniture arrangements and interior design elements may reveal the balanced or imbalanced gap that separates children’s own needs, inclinations and wishes from those imposed by adults. Hence, domestic landscapes in children’s books can portray the ideas, values, feelings, habits and customs of contemporary societies. Architecture and interior design in picturebooks may also be conceived as catalysts to inspire social reflections on children’s culture and education. The creation of special architectural perspectives and interior design settings may therefore transform visual fictious spaces into living matter. After some preliminary reflections on the historical development of architecture and interior design in Italian children’s culture in the 20th century, this paper will investigate how Bruno Munari, a major international designer and artist, was able to entangle his children’s books with architecture, exploiting the representations of buildings and interior design elements to convey family, social and cultural values.