As I explored the relationships and connections of my book “A complete body of architecture” by Isaac Ware, I looked for content that my book holds with other books, across space and time. To do so, I adopted the digital library of Xenotheka. I explored this universe of connections with Alice, a special search engine of Xenotheka developed by Miro Roman and Digital Architectonics at ETH.
By adopting the knowledge on my book that I have developed in the first two tasks, I found two other books that share some of its topics and themes. Typing into the research engine words that describe the topics and arguments in my book (e.g. architectural plans, technical drawings, explanation of architecture, components of architecture, orders, decorations, principles) I come up with two related books and as I explored the connections and relationships.
By typing in the words describing my book, I also came to some dead ends: I could not find any relations when I looked for the words: architectural plans, explanation of architecture and principles. The brain I used was Xenotheka and for the topic of conversation I chose “architecture”.
When I typed in “Components of architecture” I found the book “Twentieth Century Architecture” by Leatherbarrow Eisenschmidt. I chose it because it relates to my book in several ways even though it’s from a totally different time. It also contains information about orders and proportion, scale, appearance, and overall principles of architecture just from a very different perspective as in my book. So, it contains the same topics as my book such as the appearance and building components but deals with a different you could say overall topic which is “standardized building systems”.
The second book I chose is called “Elements of Architecture” by Rem Koolhaas. It appeared to me twice in Alice when I looked for the books. Once when I typed in “orders” and once when I typed in “decoration”. This again confirms the relation to my book. It connects with A complete body of architecture, as it also deals with principles of architecture, explanations of how to build and various components of architecture. The difference is in the opinion when it comes to decoration. It says, “Decoration comes secondary” that, as I had the feeling, is the complete opposite than in my book because there is a lot of information about decoration in various aspects and detail.