Combination
For the book Neü-herfürgegebene Kriegsarchitectur by Christoph Heidemann I chose the concept of combination. The book is divided into two main parts. The first part is a written text with references to the second part which are illustrations. Each text section describes an illustration in the second part of the book in detail. Text and illustrations combined lets the reader to fully or further understand what is written. I think this combination is interesting, because the author or publisher chose not to include the drawings on the same page as the description itself, but to put all the drawings in the back. I am not sure how practical that may be for the reader himself though, as he is always required to look for the reference drawing in the latter part of the book.
The illustration part of the book combines rough drawings and more in detail drawings of the new military architecture very nicely. At first it seems as if it begins with the rough sketches of the structures geometry and as we continue to read the illustrations get more and more into detail with data on height and thickness. But looking more closely that is not the case. The illustrations are very well-matched, on each page a combination of rough sketches and detailed drawings, so the reader can get the best of two worlds while studying the structure’s geometry. Further the drawings are also related to each other. On some pages we find the floor plan and the matching sectional drawing, on others we find sectional drawings which are then shown in a perspective drawing. Looking at the illustration part as a whole it seems like there is a repetition of geometry of the military architecture. I think it’s important to note that this book explains in detail how one particular military structure is built and further elaborates on various different forms of this one structure. That is the reason why the drawings may seem almost identical at first glance, but are solely shown as a repetitive geometry with small variations.
Lastly, I think it’s interesting how the concept of combination can also be applied to the layout of the book which in my eyes is a combination of reference and repetition. To elaborate: We get referred to the illustrations from the text and vice versa. The repetition shows in the text format and in the repetition of the last word of each page on the next page.
Keywords:
- Reference / Relation
- Repetion
- Geometry