Like buildings, pictures have not “simply been there.” Nor do they appear out of nowhere. They come into being, are perceived, and develop. That in this process pictures have an inseparable relationship to buildings and vice versa is obvious.There is a history to this relationship that begins at some point — usually quite early. In this book Dieter Maurer and Claudia Riboni use drawings and paintings, commonly referred to as “doodles” or “children’s drawings,” to trace this “early his- tory.” But the authors are less interested in the childlike content of the works than in the drawings and paint- ings themselves. And they rely on their skills of observation : Drawings and paintings are compiled in six chapters, each of which illuminates a central aspect of early infantile drawings and the depiction of buildings in them.The texts in the book play a secondary role to the illustrations and are limited to concise and pro- found thoughts about the relationship between pictures and buildings.
How pictures find houses and the house comes into the picture are among the findings of many years of extended research conducted by Dieter Maurer and Claudia Riboni on the question of early infantile pic- tures and their development. Unlike an academic trea- tise, this book places its entire trust in the power of the pictures themselves, using the observation of them to answer elementary questions about the picture, the house and the human.