Friends with an old book.
When we were given this task in last September in the first moment I was a little bit confused what this exercise should serve us. But when I mentioned that this book is pretty old, older than everything else I’ve ever had in my life, I was excited to met my „friend“. Furthermore it was surprisingly to receive an exercise for one year and I was also very impressed because my book was published in 1555.
The second exercise, when I actually became friends with my book from Diego de Sagredo was an interesting experience. I’ve ordered my book in the ETH library, like everybody else. So I went to the library but when I was there and asked for the ordered book, the librarian said me that the book wasn’t ready right now because they couldn’t find it. So he asked me if I could wait. So at this point, it falls me into place that it isn’t that easy to became friends with an old book… So I had to wait and then, finally, „La raison d’architecture antique extraicte de Vitruve & autres anciens architecteurs” written by Diego de Sagredo was brought to me. Before I’ve done this exercise, the imagination of reading this book for twenty minutes seemed to me a very long time. Another reason that I wasn’t that motivated to read this book, was because it is written in french. But when I opened the book, I saw that this book has a couple of illustrations, drawings and sketches. So I’ve understood something of his explanations in spite of my French skills. Lucky me! So I didn’t had to feel that bad, because I haven’t unterstand anything (because of my french skills…). As I thumbed through this book from Diego de Sagredo it stood out that we had very similar thing in the „Baugeschichte“ and „Architekturgeschichte“ lectures such as in this book was described. So I received very good figures and drawings to the different orders and columns etc. It was nice for me because so I could repeat the content of the lectures and I’ve got also a couple of good illustrations to study with for the exams in summer.
For me it was the first time of having such an article of value. So the first couple of minutes I felt weird to leaf through this book with gloves and having a pillow for the spine. But I have to say this exercise was the one I liked the most. Because by the other tasks it was quite difficult to find something useful and sometimes also hard to understand the context or all of it.
In the end it was a nice experience and it was meaningful to make this exercise over one year. In this way we had the possibility to understand the book in depth. For me the highlight of this whole task was the visit in Einsiedeln. I was impressed of the property of the library and it was a nice experience to have such old books in my hands.