My book and my friend is called «A treatise on civil architecture» written by William Chambers. And because he dealt with columns in the first chapter, I typed in «Columns», after I continued looking for «Civil architecture» and in addition typed in the name of the first chapter «Origin of buildings» in the search engine Alice and all three led me to a book by Euclid called «The thirteen books of the elements».
The similarity of the books was clearly the geometrical approach on elements in an abstract or more architecture way. But it was really interesting how different William Chambers and Euclid did this approach. Because Euclid’s argumentation was strongly focused on a mathematical approach, he writes endlessly about circles, triangles and different propositions, which reminds me more of a book in mathematics than in architecture. William Chambers talked more about existing columns and other architecture elements and discussed them in his book. But I think this can be explained with Euclid being more of a philosopher than an architect.
And because I was wondering, I wanted a book with more similarities, I was also looking for «Treatise on civil architecture», the title of William Chambers’ book. Where I came up with another book of a famous philosopher, named Aristoteles with a book called “A treatise on government”. This book is the second part of a treatise of which the Ethics is the first part, clearly very interesting, but I thought that was to different, none the less it was interesting to find a second connection to a philosopher.
In the end I wanted to be less specific and typed in “Architecture” just to see where it will get me. And to my luck I found the very known book by Vitruvius called “Ten books on architecture”. This book was clearly the one with the most similarities, they both were a treatise or kind of an encyclopedia in which a lot of connected topics were discussed. Vitruvius’ book has more text than William Chambers’ which is loaded with drawings, but in this way they complement each other very nice.