At first I had trouble understanding the organization and function of the Xenotheka digital library. After switching the topic of the conversation to Architecture, I could understand the concept of the program better and was able to start the actual assignment.
The book assigned to me named “V Clomunae” by Hans Blum is about the description and usage of the five colums and their order. For this reason, I used “column” as the first keyword in the Alice search engine. Thereby I got 1000 results, which present the study of architectural elements and their history. Especially in the book “Elements of Architecture” by Rem Koolhaas I found some similarities with V Columnae. Like Hans Blum, Koolhaas analyzed the basic research for understanding architectural elements such as cornices, facades and columns. Both address the development and the commonalities, as well as differences of the elements and complement their theories and texts with drawings. The differences can be seen in the representations, as there is a discrepancy of about 500 years in the time of origin. For this reason, Koolhaas also treats in his book elements like escalator and elevator, which were unknown in the 16th century, in Blum’s time.
As a second keyword I use “five orders” to find another book, which describes possible similarities with V Columnae in content. One of the results was the book “a History of architectural theory from Vitrivius to the present” by Hanno Walter Kruft. The book is researched, analyzed and arranged the most significant statements of architectural theorists of the last two thousand years by using original sources. Among other things, Kruft examines the five orders. In his Architectura, he presents five different ways each order can be used and decorated, but unlike Blum, he incorporates the orders into designs for entire buildings. Likewise, the History of architectural theory from vitrivius to the present consists only of text and no illustrations like V Colunnae by Hans Blum.
I found your post because I was searching for the word “column”. I think the book assigned to you “V Clomunae” has a lot of similarities to the one that was assigned to me, because it also is about orders of the five columns: “toskantic, doric, ionic, korinthic and komposit”. My book only has pictures and drawings in it so I think that’s a difference to your book because you wrote that it has text and pictures. Furthermore, I do think there is a difference regarding the fact that yours also addressed cornices and facades. In my book it is only written about columns.
The book assigned to me is called: “Des Jacobi Barozzi von Vignola Grund Regeln” by Johann Rudolph Feasch
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I typed in Rem Kohlhaas, because my book ( Recueil elementaire d’architecture by Jean-François de Neufforge) has a lot similarities to Kohlhaas’ book despite being written years later. So I came across your post. You also have the book «Elements of architecture» from Rem Kohlhaas chosen in the task Xenotheka. My book also contains a lot of drawings and shows architectural elements like yours and the one of Kohlhaas. Furthermore you write that your next keyword in Alice was “five orders” which also is fitting the content of my book, I actually also searched for five orders to find similar books for the Xenotheka task.
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