I just started my premier year of university and one of the first tasks was introduced as Friends with an old book. Surely I was keen on finding friends at the ETH, but I was more thinking of fellow students as friends and not old dusty books. The exercise sounded interesting to me, even though I would describe myself more as the Friends with a Netflix Series guy. My enthusiasm dropped slightly when I read the title of my book: L’architecture francoise. A book from Paris. Therefore written in French. Which means I won’t understand a single word. As it turned out this wasn’t a big deal for the first exercises, which were just doing general research about our book. Then I had to meet with my book (like a blind-date arranged by Astengo Gregorio). It was a cold, rainy Advent day where you just want to be inside and drink mulled whine, but I travelled to Einsiedeln to make real contact with my book. As all the other tasks were only online, I was somehow looking forward to physically work with this historical piece. The first thing I noticed when opening my book was a little paper where the origin was guaranteed. The book was purchased at an auction for 6’250 £. Nothing to ad to this number…
Honestly I hadn’t tried to read a single sentence, because as I mentioned above, my French language knowledge is disastrous. Luckily Jacques-Francois Blondel used loads of illustrations so I could still understand pretty good what the book was about. Many of them were foldable and unbelievably detailed. It seemed like my book treats everything you need to know about French architecture. The index already used several pages and the whole book itself was massively bigger than most of the other books in the library. Still one book wasn’t enough for Blondel, so he published 3 more (architecture francoise vol. 2-4), all of them between 1742 and 1755.
Luckily there were already some people who have done my work before and digitalised the whole book, so the following tasks weren’t a big deal for me. Due to this, I don’t really remember anything from those exercises.
Looking back I definitely don’t regret my friendship I built up during this year. It was a new experience and especially the visit in Einsiedeln was very interesting. At the end I maybe would wish to spend even more time there to look through the book and maybe even try to read some crazy French sentences. Who knows, as some say, you always meet twice in life…