A Town For More Than Just A Doll

This pop-up book was authored and illustrated by Ciera Okere, Sophia Dew, and Brenna Sandoval.

We chose to make a children’s book about Tatiana Bilbao, a contemporary Mexican architect whose works often focus on sustainability and housing accessibility. We were extremely drawn to the way that she approaches architecture through six lenses: Social Landscape, Density, Education, Affordability, Domesticity and Culture. Her projects in each of these areas really resonated with us as designers who want to mix design practice with social good. In addition to her ethical design practices, were also drawn to Bilbao because of her position as a woman in the often male-dominated field of architecture. In our view, presenting Bilbao’s works in our pop book was an opportunity to showcase the accomplishments of a female designer and hopefully show young girls that there is a place for them in the field.

Our story is a reimagination of a particular moment in Tatiana’s life: receiving a barbie doll. Bilbao recalls this as a part of her introduction to architecture, as she played with the doll by building a town for it to live in. In our retelling of this moment in Bilbao’s life, we are combining her childhood ambitions with her real-life architecture. Each building that she shows in the story relates to one of her six categories of architecture. The interactive element of our book is that her doll’s buildings transform into her future real-life projects. We decided that using slides and slide animations for this interactive feature was preferable, because we wanted the images of the block buildings to be able to quickly disappear and be replaced by the images of the real buildings.

The main goal of our book is to use Bilbao’s story and accomplishments to spread a message of empowerment to other young girls. Though based on the true story from Bilbao’s life and centered around her real-life works, parts of the plot are imagined (e.g. in our retelling, we have also taken creative liberty and introduced the fictional character of her brother).

We hope that this book has achieved its purpose and struck a chord with female designers, no matter their age. We would like to credit Bilbao’s interview “Tatiana Bilbao: On Buildings and Barbies” with NOWNESS as a source for the barbie story that inspired our pop-up. That interview can be found here ( https://www.nowness.com/story/tatiana-bilbao-on-buildings-and-barbies). We would also like to credit Bilbao’s website for both photographs and information on her buildings. Her website is linked here (https://www.tatianabilbao.com/projects ).

Learn more about her work https://www.tatianabilbao.com/about.