At the beginning, there were some issues working on the Alice platform, not knowing what to start with, what commands to look for to find books that resemble both in terms of content and theme with mine , “Arhitectura” by Gabriel Kramer. Firstly, I chose as the topic of the conversation “architecture”, as Alice’s brain I chose “Xenotheka Library” and then I decided to start the search directly by typing the theme of the book, “the five orders”, because the choice with typing the name of the book was not a successful one. “Arhitectura” ,being the main theme and has several meanings and interpretations. The result of the second search was not satisfactory either , because I came across countless books that correspond as a topic, but not as a content. That’s why I tried to use other brains, but the books I found were getting further and further away from my search. As a second step, I decided to look for something more precise. My book contains countless drawings and sketches, so I decided to look for “the five order-drawings”,I switched to “column drawings”, “the five orders and columns” but unfortunately, my searches returned 0 results.
So I decided to search by the type of the book. “Arhitectura” by Gabriel Kramer is considered a “Säulenbuch”, so I searched for “column book” and after a lot of searching, I managed to find books that resemble with mine.
The books that I found, browsed and was delighted with are “Architecture Volume I” by Sebastiano Serlio, “A History of Architectural Theory” by Kruft and “Unity and Discontinuity” by De Jonge. Even though my book contains only drawings and sketches that represent the five orders in columns, these books are similar to mine because these are also Säulenbücher, meaning they explain and present in the same way the types of orders illustrated in columns. The books that I have found differentiate from “Arhitectura” in that they provide not only pictures, but also explanatory texts, which help the reader to better understand the details and reasons that these orders offer.
Maybe these books do not present the theme in the same style as my book, the idea is mainly the same. I considered these to be the most appropriate, which are similar and correspond to my book “Arhitectura! by Gabriel Kramer.