After getting used to the Alice search engine through the tutorial I experimented with a lot of different words and topics. My book: “Grund Regeln über die fünff Säulen» from Des Jacobi Barozzi von Vignola is about different styles of columns. It has many illustrations. For Alice´s brain I found the best results with the Xenotheka´s library. I varied the topic of the conversation to get better results. The most pleasing results I got with “design”. The text I entered in the search field was “column” and I used the explore function to search. I found that choosing the right topic is crucial to finding the thing you want with this search engine.
First up I want to say that I couldn´t find any books which are specifically just for columns. After clicking through various books, I found two that I found myself worthy to compare. The first one is “Modern Architectural Theory” by Harry Francis Mallgrave and the second one is “Late Gothic Architecture” by Robert Bork.
The book “Modern Architectural Theory” has it´s similarities to my book in the very precise description of the styles. My book does it with illustrations and the this one does it with text. In general, this book has a lot less illustrations than my book. It also talks about the five styles of columns but with a little less depth but in a more historical context I would say. In my book the focus is really on the columns as is but here in this book it is more about columns as a design element.
The second chosen book “Late Gothic Architecture” is as the name reveals about the gothic architecture. I chose this book because in contrast to the other one, this one is specific about one architectural style. On the Xenothek you can find all kinds of books to different styles and I wanted to highlight that if you have certain interests you´ll find something there. The book is in depth about this particular epoch. My book is good for an overview about all the different kinds of columns but if you are really invested in a certain style it´s maybe suited to grab a book like this one which is a bit more all-round about the style.