Observations
Since the book is written in old fashioned italian from the year 1737, i was not able to understand most of the words from the book or am able to translate it into a comprehensible language. But scrolling through the book i was able to decipher the some of the ideas that Guarini wrote in this book. He made some observations about architecture from the 17th century and wrote his thoughts and views of architecture in the book as he titles them “OSSERVATIONE PRIMA, OSSERVATIONE SECONDA… “. In the chapters 3 to 10 he made his observations. In each chapter Guarini talks about a different aspects of architecture. His observations also have a short title, he probably observed some rules how architecture is made or what architecture is. In chapter 3, he is talking about the tools of architecture. In his 6th and 7th observation in chapter 3 he is alking about the colours of architecture, maybe what colours the materials have or how the color reflects the building. In chapter 7 he talks about the property. In chapter 8 he talks about the proportions, what proportions the buildings have, what rules he found in the architecture. Guarino Guarini also studied mathematics and wrote 4 mathematical books, one of them is about descriptive geometry. Therefore i believe Guarini is always looking for rules in its forms and symmetry in architecture.
Each chapter has 4- 15 observations. The chapter with the least amount of observations is chapter 5 with only 4 observations and the chapter with the most observations is chapter 6, in this chapter he made 15 observations. He structures his book very clearly, the chapters are written in big letters and the observations in the same size, under the observation title a small description.
In conclusion going through this book by Guarini without actually understanding the language you will see how Guarini saw architecture back in the 18th century and how he was thinking when he was observing the buildings and its properties, wrote down his thoughts and made his conclusions out of his careful observations. His observations are just plain text without any pictures or drawings, although there seems to be an emblem at the end of the book. I imagine he was strolling around his town and just made some notes when looking at the buildings, almost like a journal. He does not invent anything new in his observations, he just writes down what rules architecture has and how architecture is made.
Keywords: Observe, Themes, Thoughts