Keywords: detailed illustrations, text, comprehensive
Looking at this book, it seemed pretty boring to me. The cover is simply a brown leather case with nothing on it at all. So I figured maybe when I go through the pages it becomes more interesting. So starting of, it consists of a lot of text. But to make it a little more interesting those texts are not only written on a blank page, the texts are surrounded by a black square. This style is continuing throughout the whole book. So it seemed a little more interesting than this boring brown cover.
But the more I went through the pages the more boring it got because there was a lot of text and it was written in French, and since my French is not the best I couldn’t understand that much either. I almost lost hope going any further but then the book became interesting. It began with simple illustrations of pillars. The interesting part was, that those illustrations were pretty detailed for only to be an illustration. So I went further and found more and more illustrations. It began with simple pillars and capitelles which were really detailed and ended with floorplans from buildings which had measurements and stuff.
I became really interested and went through those illustrations. I looked at them in detail and figured that some illustrations were kind of a lexicon. For example there were different types of pillars which we even discussed in history class. And I think those texts in between the pictures described those illustrations as well in even more detail. So I guess those illustrations were sort of a summary of the different types how you build for example a pillar or a capitelle.
Considering the title of the book ,,cours d’architecture’’ it also made sense to me. I think this book should literally be sort of a course for architectural buildings or the different types of building methods. It gives you sort of a guideline how to construct those different types of structures. The floorplans are really detailed and the different structures even have numbers on it with an explanation what it is, at the bottom of the page or even written in the picture itself. So even if the text is in French, I think those illustration make it easy or more clear to comprehend what this book is all about.