For this task I needed to adjust firstly with Alice and how to use her right. At first I tried to find things about France in the 17th century because that is a big topic in Martin Zeillers book. I received many french authors In my first attempt and in particular books about the history of france, for example Michelet, the history of France Vol 1. For this attempt I used for Alice‘s brain the Xenotheka library, the topic was France and the search was 17th century. But I also came to a dead end because the search was way too general and even books of Karl Marx started to come up because he mentioned the 17th century once in his book.
I continued my research by narrowing down my interest and so I started to search for Versailles because I remembered that Versailles was an important part in french architecture of the 17th century and many saw in it inspiration for new architecture. Michelets book popped up again and it mentioned that there is a very old portrait of him in the Versailles museum. I searched online more about who Jule Michelet was and found that he was a historian whos focus was on french history and culture. He was also an anti-clerical republicanist and he was also the first historian who picked up Giorgio Vasaris term of „rebirth“ and with it the concept of the period of the renaissance.
For my next attempt with using Alice, I chose again the Xenotheka library as her brain and also for the search Versailles. This time I changed my topic to architecture in hopes to finding more parallels to Martin Zeillers book. I again found random facts at first like in Malgraves book Modern Architectual Theory, that the new Germany, after his unification as a nationstate, was declared in Versailles. after that I started to look out for more modern links. Koolhaas‘ Elements of Architecture is one of them. He mentions Versailles in the context of architects and their inspiration of Versailles. He sais that all their sketches were inspired by Versailles and very rural. I was Interested by his choice of word „rural“ and that also reminded me of the illustartions in Martin Zeillers book of different regions in France. I further researched about Koolhaas and his meaning of rural and discovered that Koolhaas sees a future in the countryside. Mejor changes happen today on the countryside and more colossal structures appear out of nowhere in rural regions. He has a large interest in rural transformations.