Process
My book “Paradossi per pratticare la prospettiva senza saperla” has perspective in drawings as its main theme. Thus, I knew that the first word to search for had to be “perspective”. However, I had to quickly realize that this generates far too many results and especially far too many which do not really have anything in common with my book. So, I started playing around with different words such as: drawing, architectural drawing, painting, illustration, guide, manual, geometry, Perspektivlehre, Zeichenlehre etc. hoping for more precise and accurate results.
I must admit that I expected it to be easy to find a similar book to mine, but this was not the case. I often got the same results multiple times, despite entering new and different search words.
I tried out all the different “brains” of Alice but finally concluded that the Xenotheka library offered the best results.
I also tried out multiple different “topics of conversation” (architecture, illustration, practical, …), and played around with the “Find” and the “Explore” button. The explore button often offered thousands of results whereas the find button came up with zero results many times.
After a lot of browsing, I found two books which have similar topics and themes as mine:
Findings
Elements of Architecture, Rem Koolhaas:
This book talks about the basics of construction such as doors, windows, balconies, floors and many more. It is essentially a collection of fundamental architectural elements and their history and functions as a source for information.
I chose this book because it deals with something that is a huge part of architecture and our every-day life but is not really paid much attention to. We don’t really think much about the evolution of windows and doors, yet they are a substantial part of architecture/ our life. The same can be said about perspective. It plays a very important role in drawings and architecture, but it is also a somewhat overlooked topic. Even the title of Troili’s book suggests that you must not even know/ understand it (“senza saperla”). Both books are informational and act as reference books for their specific topics.
Additionally, while leafing through the book by Koolhaas I noticed that it has a lot of pictures which take up a lot of space on the pages in comparison to the corresponding texts. This also reminded me of my book as it too has a lot of illustrations and only little accompanying text.
Drawing; The Motive Force of Architecture, Peter Cook:
This book is about architectural drawing and contains many illustrations by famous architects. It highlights the important role of drawing in an architect’s process and gives many insights. The book also speaks about technological trends and improvements in architecture and how hand drawing is becoming increasingly obsolete. I thought this was quite interesting because my book teaches hand drawing and I think that the book by Cook is a more modern version which shows the possibilities by drawing on a computer. Both books have architectural drawing as their main theme.