When the exercise was presented to us for the first time, I was very skeptical. I was afraid that the exercises will take me a lot of time and becoming friends with such an old book is impossible. When we received the first task I thought: That’s it? I really appreciated that the exercises were always manageable. Especially that we always had enough time and got a reminder to do the task.
The book I was assigned with as the title “Practical Architecture” and was written by William Halfpenny. Luckily the book was not very long and easy to understand because the main content were architectural drawings from columns, doors and windows presenting the five orders. I think the most interesting task for all of us was task 2 where we got physically in touch with the book. Although it was the most time-consuming task it was my favorite. Moreover, my book has very little pages and every second double page is empty so filming the book for 20minutes was actually way too long but never mind.
Unfortunately, due to the lockdown I was not able to visit the Werner Oechslin Library in Einsiedeln in person and the virtual visit via zoom couldn’t replace this experience at all.
During the semester I was glad that my book was very easy to understand and didn’t had a lot of content like that I didn’t had a lot of extra work in stressful times. Looking back, I’d prefer a more interesting friendship with a more complex book.
Nevertheless, getting in touch with such an old book was an interesting experience. As first year student it was also nice to get to know the infrastructure and the different places to go if you want to study an old book, also for future researches. I can understand now why we had to do this exercise but there was a lot of time between the tasks. Also with regard of the other ”Grundlagen” exercises from the chair of GTA it was too mixed up for me. This makes it more difficult to delve into the exercises and get into it in the first place.