The book I am working with, “Dell’Architettura” by Mario Gioffredo is written in Italian and contains many drawings and little text. Since I unfortunately do not understand Italian, I have taken my search terms mainly from the drawings.
The book shows many drawings of columns and ornaments and their mathematical backgrounds, which is why the first term I typed into Ask Alice was “ornaments”.
While browsing the suggestions I came across the book “Eighteenth-Century Architecture” by van Eck.
In general, as the title suggests, this book is about 18th century architecture and is divided into two parts, the first part “The Main Actors” and the second part “Arcitectural Discourse”. Between chapters that deal, for example, with the experience of architectural space or science and mathematics in architecture, there are always chapters that portray different buildings.
Chapter 4 “Ornament in Architecture” by Jean-François Bédard deals specifically with ornaments and contains drawings that look very similar to the book Dell’Architettura.
I really liked the following quote:
“The intrinsic verity of ornaments had always been questionable, Blondel conceded: unlike the orders and their moldings, sculpted motifs did not originate in a natural order improved by mathematics, and their presence was never essential to architecture.”
The second word I looked up in Ask Alice was “geometry” and I came across the book “Stone Architecture Ancient and Modern Construction Skills” by Acocella.
This book covers everything about stone architecture from the Egyptian pyramids to urban paving.
One chapter is about columns, which is another parallel to the book “Dell’Architetura”.
A quote from this book which I liked very much in connection with the word “geometry” is:
“Architecture is based on the search for the principles of a perfect, timeless geometry.”
In summary, I found it very interesting to look at the same topics from different books (points of view) and thus to further deepen the knowledge from our first book.