Irina Burau
Using the search engine “Alice” with the “Architecture Library” as Alice’s brain and “architecture” as the conversation topic led to multiple dead ends. Keywords like: Perspective, perspective drawing, graphic drawing and Salomon de Caus only led to books about architectural history. The output was heavily based on the conversation topic rather than the actual keyword. Changing the brain or the topic of conversation to “graphic” or “perspective” didn’t make the search results any more related to my book: “La Perspective avec la raison des ombres et miroirs” by Salomon de Caus.
However, one book that appeared often during my searches was “The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume I: A New Framework for Architecture” by Patrick Schumacher. This book covers comparisons of multiple architectural theories to different domains like politics, science, economics and art. I couldn’t find any fundamental relationship between the two books other than the book briefly mentions the importance of perspective. This book was published 2010 so 398 years later than the book by Salomon de Claus.
By applying “perspective” as the keyword, architecture as the topic of conversation and “Library of St.Augustine’s friends” as the brain The sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt appeared. It’s a sketchbook with about 250 drawings. Some of the drawings are based on construction plans. Floor plans, cross sections and details from buildings are beautifully illustrated. A similarity between the two books is the combination of texts and drawings. Adding to that the sketches of Honnecourt have a special kind of perspective. Based on the theory of graphic drawing by Salomon de Caus some of the sketches by Honnecourt would be full of mistakes . The book dates back to the second quarter of the 13th century.
All in all the use of Alice didn’t deliver a very good match to the book by Salomon de Caus.