To search and talk with Alice I had to think about what topic my book „Tutte le opere di architettura“ by Serlio contains. This was not so easy because as the title already says it’s about all the works of architecture. There are a lot of drawings and descriptions to understand how the different buildings were built. It’s like an encyclopedia for architects.
That being said the category wasn’t such a problem for me to choose because only three words pop up if you type in „architect“: Architecture, Architect, Architectural. So every time I tried looking for a new word I used all three topics of conversation. The results were more or less the same each time so I played a little with Alice’s Brain. I went through all the brains with the same three topics and search words to find some books that in a way are connected to mine. The words I used were: History, Explanation, Drawings.
I stumbled across a lot of books that don’t have anything to do with „Tutte le opera di architettura“ but when I found this exact book at the very top when I searched for „Drawings“ in „Library of Shakespeare’s Friends“ I just knew this was the write place. After a little scrolling I found my first book called „The four books on architecture“ by Palladio and I opened it on the Xenotheka. The first thing I noticed are the drawings in the book of columns that looked almost the same to Serlio’s. After a little reading it was clear to me that this book is in fact also a encyclopedia for architecture. It also contains descriptions, explanations and drawings and not only about architecture but also about geometry.
The second book I found is called „Vasari on Technique“ by Vasari. Differently to the other two book there was a little more text but still a lot of drawings to explain. Vasari writes about different techniques for different materials to build or to paint. This time the encyclopedia isn’t just about the physics of the building and how to build it but about the physics of the little parts and about the best techniques to build them precisely and as perfect as possible.