Since my assigned book mostly contains detailed drawings of building form interior and exterior perspectives, my objectives when I tried to find related books were mainly to find something which is also filled with pictures and as least text as possible. When opening Alice, I was slightly taken aback by its colourfulness but quickly adapted to its’ usage after trying to look for a suited book a couple of times. As a topic of conversation, I typed in “architecture” and as a text message I tried to go with “drawings”. The first book that appeared was called “Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture”. It is a book filled with elements of architecture depicted through digital pictures and photography. It was not exactly what I was looking for, but close enough when it comes to the content. As for the second attempt I tried looking for hand drawn illustrations, still staying within the topic of architecture. Alice then mostly came up with more works of Koolhaas, but I was more interested in a new name. But unfortunately, mostly books, that contained text only, appeared. After this experience, I switched up the topic on Alice and typed in “Historical”, instead. As for the text message I typed in “architectural”. Again, most results were related to Koolhaas. This is why I decided to compare my book with two books of Koolhaas.
In Koolhaas’ “Elements of Architecure” you could say that it is a much more modern version of Giovanni’s “Il Nuovo Splendore delle fabriche in prospettiva di roma moderna”. It is published by Harvard 2012 and was later used as a basis at the venice architecture biennale. Both books show architectural elements from two very different eras of architecture.
In the second book of Koolhaas, called “SMLXL”, I was much more satisfied with the outcome. The book had a lot of hand drawn floorplans and buildings put into perspective, which much more resemble the book by Giovanni. Sadly, there were no drawings that could compare to Giovanni’s insane detailing in his illustrations.