My old book is about the Dome of the Pantheon in Paris. So when I started to get acquainted with Xenotheka and the Ask Alice platform, I searched for the most obvious keywords first. I started in the Xenotheka library with the words dome and a little later with Pantheon and also Paris. When I searched for the keyword dome, the very famous book “Les miserables” by Victor Hugo appeared which I have read and in my opinion has very little to do with my book except maybe for the fact that it is set in France. The same also happened with “Oliver Twist” by Dickens which has even less similarities because it mostly takes place in London. So I then decided to switch to the architecture library to get books with more useful relations.
The first book that really caught my attention was “Gotham A History of New York City to 1898» by Edwin G. Burrows. It is a non-fiction book which is based on over twenty years of research. Just as my book it is a book about the history of something. In my book’s case it is the history of a very famous building and in the case of Edwin Burrows’ book he covers the history of the entire city of New York to 1898. It is a massive book which also uses 160 photos and linecuts and 15 maps which is also a very important aspect of the book “Mémoire historique sur le Dôme du Panthéon Français” even though there they mostly use drawings. Both books are very important. The book “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898” even won the Pulitzer Price for history in the year 1999. The book mentions the Rotunda an apparently Pantheon like building and also different domes and the materials they are made of.
Another Rise of the Modern Hospital An Architectural Hist» by Jeanne Kisacky. It is a book focused on the profound changes of hospital design. She talks about a lot of problems of creating an environment that yould function as a therapy but also is tool for the facilitation of increasingly technologically assisted medical procedures. The book contains a lot of illustrations of floorplans, drawings and also photographs. Like in my book this book evaluates problems and tries to find the best solution possible even if it is a completely different situation an approach.