The Story of Architecture

Author: Wang Shouzhi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Actually, I have been telling stories about design my whole life, but before, I mostly did it on stage, rarely through books. Now, I want to tell these stories to everyone through this thin book. If you read one or two pages every day, it's like listening to me tell a story every day. Maybe by the end of the year, you'll learn a lot of new things. How much time does it take to read one or two pages a day? For those who read quickly, it's about four or five minutes, and for those who read more carefully and slowly, it's no more than 10 minutes. If you can stick to this habit for 365 days, you'll read a book solidly over the year.,,. This book mainly discusses design and design culture. It's illustrated and easy to read. Actually, I have been telling stories about design my whole life, but before, I mostly did it on stage, rarely through books. Now, I want to tell these stories to everyone through this thin book. If you read one or two pages every day, it's like listening to me tell a story every day. Maybe by the end of the year, you'll learn a lot of new things. How much time does it take to read one or two pages a day? For those who read quickly, it's about four or five minutes, and for those who read more carefully and slowly, it's no more than 10 minutes. If you can stick to this habit for 365 days, you'll read a book solidly over the year.,,. Most of the important stories and common knowledge I can still remember now were read between the ages of 16 and 30. Back then, I read everything in a haphazard way without any guidance, just reading whatever I could get my hands on. Actually, a 17-year-old kid like me couldn't really understand Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" or Aragon's "The Communist Manifesto," even though the more popular Mayakovsky's constructivist poetry was beyond my appreciation at the time. I could barely remember some superficial knowledge of Byron, Keats, the Bront?s, Hawthorne, and Galsworthy. But no matter how much I understood, I just loved to read. Year after year, even when I was doing manual labor in the countryside or working in a factory, I still managed to read for a couple of hours every day. Back then, there was no specific plan (in fact, there was no plan for me to have one, except for the "Selected Works of Mao Zedong," there weren't many books sold in the Xinhua Bookstore). I read whatever I could get my hands on. I never expected that the scattered knowledge I accumulated would actually stick with me, and now I still remember it. When chatting with American colleagues, whenever it comes to these topics, I can still respond. Those casual bits of knowledge I gathered back then about Soviet and Eastern European culture made me more knowledgeable in these areas than many of my colleagues. When discussing Shostakovich or Bartók's music, I can speak intelligently, and when talking about Sholokhov or Kundera, I don't sound too clueless. Even when I write, I can easily extract and apply the essence of classic works. At times like these, I truly thank myself for that passion for reading back then and believe in the power of reading a little every day. When I was young, I did have a stubborn streak and was determined to read a lot of books to become a cultured person. I set goals for myself and tried to meet them on time. In 1963, I was admitted to the high school division of what was then called Wuhan Normal College Attached High School, which is now renamed Hubei University Attached High School. From my own perspective, there were two unique advantages to attending an attached high school of a university. First, there were university graduates who came to teach us every year, and their ages were only slightly older than ours. They brought new ideas and excitement, which truly encouraged and inspired us. Second, the university library often lent some of its more extensive collections to the attached high school library, so our school's library was richer than that of most middle schools, especially in terms of literature, history, and philosophy.