What have I learned from this experience? Well to be completely honest not that much about history nor architecture. I’ve much more learnt to appreciate the art and amount of time invested in the book. My book has countless Illustrations which depict a vast variety of things. It must have taken a very long time to do all of that with such a precision as it is in the book. I honestly don’t want to know how many attempts and drafts were needed until this piece of art was completed. In my opinion this aspect of the book outweighs its content, as I don’t really understand what’s written and as a result, I am not able to speak about the content. But from my research the content of the book was a real game changer at that time. I know that this book has had a huge impact on the development of architecture and to a degree still influences it today, as I heard the Professor of “History of Architecture” mention Palladio, his work and his book many times.
The tasks were not very interesting. Counting the pages and the number of illustrations was a tedious task with no real outcome in the end, which made it kind of frustrating to complete. I liked the fact though, that we were forced to find a hardcopy of the ancient piece of art and spend some time with it. It’s not every day one holds a book that’s 400 years old in his hands. This part of the task really conveys how rare and precious those books really are. Most of the time the required, old book was only available at one specific library and couldn’t be taken home, one had to examine it in the library. The fact that there were so limited amounts of an edition of a book, really shows how easily books and history gets lost through time and that without making an effort to preserve those artworks they get lost very easily.
I liked that we had quite a generous amount of time to complete to individual tasks, as it shows that you understand how many other things, we have to take care of. Like that everyone can find a day or two in which he can complete the tasks without having their respective project in design and construction suffer. I really appreciate that the chair considers and respects that, unlike some other chairs.
In short, I wasn’t that interested in the tasks and just did them because I had to. Still I discovered a real admiration for the format of a book and how important it is to preserve its information. Also of course for the precision and time that went into producing these pieces of art. Some tasks, in my opinion, didn’t really have a point to them, as I didn’t really get anything out of them, but I assume it was helpful to the chair, maybe for the extension of your records.