Architectural discussion
Systematization
Parallel
Proportion
My book “Exercitationes Vitruvianae” which is written by Giovanni Poleni contains three parts. Each of the three parts is special in his own way and look somehow different. Although these three parts have something in common in the way they look like. On almost every page of the book is a big empty space left on the bottom and on one side of the page. This is probably to make notes while reading and looking at the book.
Because my book is somehow split in three parts, I also chose three different keywords. Each of the keywords describes one of the parts. For my first part I chose the word systematization, because when I looked through this part I noticed that there aren’t only texts but also a lot of different tables and family trees. I feel like Poleni tried to order things and show things systematically to make statements more clear. The second part of the book doesn’t have any tables, family trees or drawings, this whole part contains texts. What’s special about the second part is that almost all of the texts are written in two separate columns which run parallel. Due to this fact I used the keyword parallel for the second part. I think proportion describes the third part of the book the best. It is difficult to figure out what he`s talking about in this part, but just by looking at some descriptions I could recognize that one of the big themes is proportion. He`s showing different kind of drawings, for example parts of columns and in general parts of buildings. Next to the drawings are always texts, in which he probably describes how things should be built, in which proportion they are and how it should look like. He really isn’t just talking about it in general, he is looking at it very closely and tries to make things really clear. I noticed this when I looked at a part in the book where Poleni`s talking about the Ionic order and especially the volute of the capital. There are a few pages just about this volute and about its geometry and proportion.
Over all these three parts together look like he is trying to analyze things, talk about it, discuss it , describe it and draw it. Now that I learned so much about the book with just looking at it, it would be very interesting to know what it’s really about and which of my assumptions are correct and which ones aren’t.