It’s my first time to use Alice and Xenotheka. So I took my time to watch the brief presentation on the first day of class HS21 and the tutorial Videos on Youtube about Alice. In general I think it’s very nice that we get to know many new platforms and visit different libraries online or offline through gta.
Since Alice is about looking at the world from the perspective of her libraries. I started to to use Alice’s brain and chose her body with „Xenotheka Library“ I -Explored- the full title of my book “Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British architect” in the topic of architect conversation. Alice gives me 5350 result. Straightaway I found the author’s name of my book: Campbell Colin, 1715-1771. Then I started the -Find- function, Alice gives me 11 direct hit results.
From all the findings I decide to chose two books. The first one called “A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the present” from year 1994 by Hanno-Walter Kruft. The second one is “Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration” from year 1978 by Anthony Blunt. I was amazed by both contexts which Alice shows to me. From that short text I really understand how important was my book for the British Architect in history.
-Context-1: Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory-
For the first time in its history England, as befitted its role as a great power, saw itself as a model for the world in the field of architecture. In the first instance, therefore, the publications of the Palladians amount to a model compendium of English architecture, and are only secondarily concerned with Palladio himself. John Thorpe and other architects had compiled sketchbooks of English buildings from the sixteenth century onwards,7′ and in 1707 Johannes Kip and Leonard Knyff, two Dutchmen working in England, produced a collection of bird’s eye views of country houses entitled Britannia Jllustrata,73 but not until the Palladians did the sense of national destiny become linked to one particular style.The first and most important publication of the English Palladians is the threevolume Vitruvius Britannicus (1715 25)74 by Colen Campbell (1676 1729).Dedicated to King George I, this is a collection of plates designed to prove that contemporary English architecture was heir to the architecture of Antiquity and the Renaissance. The ‘Antiques’, according to the manifesto like introduction, ‘are out of the Question’, whereas the architects of the Italian Renaissance receive fulsome praise, Palladio being hailed as their foremost figure, and his works as the ne plus ultra of architecture.75 In Campbell’s view the Italians lost their ‘exquisite Taste of Building’ and ‘Antique Simplicity’ in the course of the seventeenth century, and he rejects the works of Bernini, Fontana and Borromini as ‘Gothick’ on account of their ‘capricious Ornaments’76 another example of the pejorative use of the term Gothic rebutted by Wren and Hawksmoor. He raises Inigo Jones to the status of an English Palladio, and declares Inigo’s design for the Palace of Whitehall to be beyond compare.
-Context-2: Blunt, Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration-
It was only necessary for English architects and patrons to be open to influence from abroad, and this disposition is more evident by contrast with the situation after about 1715, the year of Colen Campbell’s neo Palladian manifesto in the first volume of Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect f while the plates of his elegant publication represented a mixture of current styles, his title alluded to, and his introduction emphasized the veneration due to the work of the first English Palladian, Inigo Jones, in contrast to the excesses of Bernini, Borromini and Fontana.