Introduction to the Study of Children’s Drawings of Buildings

Abstract

Before I come to the central study of this book, I would like the sixth leg of the journey to focus attention on a very specific topic in the field of children’s drawings. As I stated at the beginning of this book, the study of children’s drawings amounts to an investigation of the mental image at its origin. And since there is no way of conducting experiments on children’s imagination as a whole, we must confine the scope of the study to a particular topic. Why did I choose to study children’s drawings of architecture? Aside from the fact that studies of the human figure have been exhaustive, and monographs on a chair (O’Shea, 1894) and on animals (Graewe, 1935) already exist, different building types recommend themselves for study because they are complex visual objects in children’s environments. Their complexity even poses a problem for the imagination of grown-ups. This was shown, for example, in the drawings of graduate students who regularly underrated the number of windows of the college building that they entered daily (Norman & Rumelhart, 1975).