This book is dedicated to all those who love children and their
wonderful, often surprising, drawings. This means it addresses all those
interested in their devel- oping capacity to produce "iconic" signs:
parents, teachers, child psychologists, artists, architects (since
building drawings are treated here), and semioticians at large-to name
but a few potential readers. Because of the broad audience, I tried to
keep scientific jargon to a minimum. Whenever this was unavoidable, I
tried to explain the terms in such a way that even beginners in
psychology could understand my arguments. I received the first impulse
to think about a book like this from the Interna- tional Year of the
Child declared by the UN in 1979. In a first phase of the project, I
obtained drawings of the six different building types treated in this
book from more than 100 children aged 3-12 years in Turkey during a stay
there as part of the faculty of Architecture of the Karadeniz Technical
University in Trabzon under the auspices of the UN- ESCO/UNDP program
TUR/75/012. My special thanks go to Dr. Erdem Aksoy, then president of
the university, and Dr. Ozgontil Aksoy, then dean of the faculty of
Architecture and Civil Engineering, for their encouragement to carry out
the project. I would also like to thank Dr. Kutzal Oztlirk, Sevinc
Erttirk, Ali Ozbilen, Hasan Saltik, together with all the teachers in
nursery and elementary schools in and around Trabzon who helped to
collect the drawings.