At first, I was overwhelmed with the enormous possibilities that you have in Ask Alice. So, I had to find a way to narrow my search results down. I used the different Brains and combinations of words. My search words were “architecture, measurement, tool, columns” I was hoping to find a book which also has an architectural tool as a topic but there were no results that matched my expectations. When I typed all before mentioned words in the results were better. Especially the word “column” seemed to be very effective, probably not a surprise. I found that the architecture library brain is most suited for this task and it comes up with the best results. It could also be a bit limiting because there is also interesting things to discover in the non-architectural world.
The first book I found was “Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968”. The book talks about a very different approach towards architecture that we have today. In the booklet of Andreas Albrecht the column is shown as something that is necessary to master and there is not much room to compromise in the design elements. He even developed a tool to properly measure the proportions of of the five orders. This leads to believe that there is no architecture without columns. I find it fascinating how much our perception of architecture has changed over the centuries.
The second book I found interesting is “Giedion, space Time and Architecture”. On Ask Alice the context part is quite interesting and makes a connection between the steel structures nowadays and the ancient columns. He talks about the continuous energy that is always at work in a column. A quite simple necessity like a column gets its design through function. So actually today we do something quite similar like Albrecht in his time. We build for the sake of mass productions and we follow strict rules and guidelines. Rarely we see unusual or revolutionizing designs which don’t follow those guidelines. Maybe it’s time to revolutionize again.