My first step in researching possibly related books in the xenotheka with Askalice was to take a look at my previous work on Wendel Dietterlin’s Architectura.
I began by searching very simple and broad terms. Door, entrance, and portal and their respective plurals were my first ideas.
The term entrances lead me to quickly discover Payne’s Renaissance and Baroque Architecture. Askalice showed a quite a few very promising extracts from the book. One of these extracts was about the Alhambra and its entrance. It talks about how one of the monumental entrances was designed to lead right to a courtyard. This links well with Diettelin’s Architectura as he too showed not only the ornamentation, which is coincidentally also mentioned by Payne in this extract, but how an entrance is linked to what lies behind it. Dietterlin showed this by showing some of his entrances in an opened state.
Another extract from Payne that links to Dietterlin’s Architectura is about describes an increase in quality in both form and function of entrances and gates. This is similar to what Dietterlin was trying to achieve. Payne does this through the medium of text, whereas Dietterlin uses drawings. Payne talks about both inscriptions and coats of arms on entrances, Dietterlin drew these.
While researching further I noticed that for both terms entrances and doors the work Elements of Architecture by Koolhaas were included among the search results. One extract from Koolhaas’s work that talks about doors is a section about the function of doors in an emergency. While the emergencies that Payne and Dietterlin thought about in their door designs and analyses was fortification against attack. Koolhaas talks about the case of a fire. In his opinion many modern doors are flawed in this aspect as they open on the wrong direction.
A third book that sadly can’t be found on Askalice yet is the book that we are collectively working on. Urban entrances is the perfect modern counterpart to Dietterlins Architectura. Both works include detailed drawings of entrances and an analysis.