Book Review of Architecture Must Burn

Why I chose this book to read? Its not a big question. I was attracted by its strange title, colorful cover, beautiful illustration and big words, and I considered it as something easy to catch. However, what I thought was wrong. Architecture Must Burn challenges us to see architecture as a way of understanding, experimenting with and changing our physical reality. Author Aaron Betsky argues passionately for a new space, a space of freedom and imagination, and proposes an entirely new way of un doing the indiscriminate, sometimes disorderly world we have so carelessly constructed. As the key words of this book, sprawl, translucency, the body, architecture beyond building have illuminated the authors main points. What make me most exciting is translucency. Translucency is just something showing a state between opacity and transparency. When we think of architecture, translucency may refer to a kind of material composing the faade of a building, or something use in upholstery. In this book, author said, If modernism gave us great transparent buildings, we now live in an era that demands translucency: the state that reveals the contours of sprawl beyond a screen of interpretation. Designers in electronic media have developed the notion of blur space as a way to convey the vast amount of information that comes into focus as you activate it through navigation. Artists are interested in the same phenomenon. Just as the word translucency, blur space is also interesting in architects eyes. What I think of blur space, far simpler, is space we cant define clearly, such as a corridor in a library, a laneway in SHikumen block. We can do some private thing in this space, and we also make many public activities happen there. Its a challenge and gusto for architects to design blur space. Generally speaking, its not a new concept when mention translucency, while we can think much more beyond translucency in architecture. Just as the conception of translucency, the author thinks much more beyond the conception it self, so the book also makes me thinks a lot. What I always ponder about this book is its title which appeals to me at the very beginning. Why the author gave it such a strange name. After I read this book, I have understood a little about this title. Not only architects need to comprehend architecture, but also much more people living around architecture need it! We design a building or a house, just making a desire to capture publics eyes, hoping other s remembered our names by our designing. Can architecture be like this? No, it must be a flame that shines out of the drabness of our daily existence. It must be a fire transforms the materials of our lives. It must explode our indifference, revealing the unseen constructions that we take for granted. As our cities grow cold, architecture must be hot. Architecture must be a beautiful fire, the hearth at the center of a world around which we gather to tell the stories that weave our society together. It must capture the essence of fires explosive and transformative nature to turn the raw into the cooked, ore into steel

and isolation into community. Instead of building fragments of a utopia we will never achieve, architecture must burn.