My first step was breaking my understanding of the book’s contents down into keywords, following the overview I had gained through task 2. In “De sacris aedificiis a Constantino magno constructis’’, the main topic are churches built by the emperor Constantine the great.
The first topic of conversation and the brains used were Architecture and the Architecture Library, followed by the text Constantine. This search didn’t reward any notable results, so I experimented with more specific pieces of text. Eventually, the text Emperor Constantine Church along with the same topic and brains as before proved fruitful. I stumbled upon the book “Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of modern Science” by Alberto Perez Gomez. In the concerning text passage, the author compares the role of physical temples built on earth throughout history in different religions. While “The Jewish God was always ambivalent about any need for a physical residence on earth (together with the well-known prohibition of graven images)”, in Christianity, the incarnation of Christ also demanded the construction of physical temples, which were introduced by Constantine.[1]
Switching from explore to find mode led to another discovery. One church specifically associated with Constantine the Great is the Dome of the Rock, constructed over the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It is mentioned in Rem Koolhaas’ “Elements of Architecture”, as well as Jacob Lassner’s “Medieval Jerusalem Forging an Islamic City in Spaces sacred to Christians and Jews” and many others. According to both Koolhaas and Lassner, this church most likely served as template for many other temples and mosques throughout the Islamic Empire. Its destruction on 1109 even culminated in the well-known crusades.[2]
Using Alice, seemed intuitive, but I often had to try both explore and find, in order to receive any kind of useful results. Many times, I saw no relation in between my search results and the chosen topics, which was also represented by very low relevance numbers.
In conclusion, my findings confirmed that this book is very specific, since there seem to be basically no other works focusing exclusively on this topic and related searches often refer to this very book. However, the churches of Constantine prove to be of great interest, although the books they are mentioned in don’t usually share Ciampini’s approach.
[1] Perez Gomez, Attunement Architectural Meaning After the Crisis of modern Science
[2] Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture