Wang Shouzhi Tells - The Story of Architecture

Author: Written by Wang Shouzhi
Publisher:
Publish Date: March 1, 2005
Features: Actually, the author has been telling stories about design throughout his life, but he used to do so mostly on stage and rarely shared them with others through books. Now, he wants 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 each day. Perhaps by the end of the year, you’ll have learned many 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 have read a book thoroughly. Little by little, like accumulating wealth from small contributions, there will be some. Most of the important stories and knowledge I still remember today were read between the ages of 16 and 30. Back then, I read haphazardly without guidance, just picking up books randomly. In reality, how could a 17-year-old kid understand Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Aragon’s Communist Manifesto, even the relatively popular Constructivist poetry of Mayakovsky? I couldn’t appreciate it properly, and I barely remembered the superficialities of Byron, Keats, the Bront?s, Hawthorne, and Galsworthy. But whether I understood them or not, I just loved reading. Over the years, even when I was working in the countryside or in a factory, no matter how tired I was, I still managed to spend a couple of hours reading each day. At that time, I had no plans (in fact, I didn’t even have the chance to make plans—aside from the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, there weren’t many books available at the time in Xinhua Bookstore), so I read whatever I could get my hands on. I never expected that the scattered knowledge I picked up would actually stick with me, and now I still remember it. When chatting with American colleagues, whenever the topic involves these areas, I can still respond. Back then, I accumulated bits and pieces of cultural knowledge about the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe without even realizing it, which made me more knowledgeable in these areas than many of my colleagues. When discussing Shostakovich or Bartók’s music, I can speak intelligently about it, and when talking about Sholokhov or Kundera, I don’t sound completely clueless. Even when I write, I can easily extract and apply the essence of classic works. During these moments, I truly thank myself for that passion for reading back then, and I firmly believe in the power of accumulating small things day by day through reading.