I started by revisiting my previous tasks and again getting in touch with the book from Alexandre le Blond “explication des termes d’architecture”. It explains architectural terms in form of a dictionary, therefore I came up with the two simple but matching keywords “architectural terms” and “dictionary”. As the topic of conversation I used “architecture”. So I typed everything in Alice and started my search.
To my surprise this search revealed hundreds of results. However I hoped for a more specific result. I tried other options, like the title of the book or “dictionary” as the topic, but they all lead to unconnected books. Therefore I stayed with the original words and looked through the recommendation.
One of the first books that Alice recommended was “Elements of Architecture” by Rem Koolhaas. I chose this book because of the similar structure. They both try to bring architecture related topics to the common reader. In contrast to le Blonds book, Koolhaas goes much more into the details and connections of his chosen terms.
My second book is from Johann Friedrich Penther, it is the first part of four which is dedicated to a dictionary. He also explains terms like le Blond in a very similar way, but additionally he translates them to different languages from the Latin-Vitruvian origin. Interesting is that they are published only 50 years apart from each other and therefore use similar methods to structure their book. On the other hand the book from Koolhaas is a way more modern and an extended version of an architecture dictionary.