Tom Wolfe - From Bauhaus to Our House

                 After I got a chance to read the book "From Bauhaus To Our House" by Mr. Tom Wolfe, I have never expect that this book will give me these much questions in my mind before. I have spend a lot of time on each page trying to understand all the text which is quiet hard to understand because of his unique style of writing, I think it may be one of the hardest book I have read so far. Even that, The book still gave me a lot of new perspectives and points of view to think about, some of them are very inspirational but also there are few of them that I am totally disagree with Mr. Tom Wolfe, mostly about how he express his opinion towards architecture in such an overly critical way.

                It is quite amazing how he was able to  criticized many well-known architects such as Mies van de Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright about their creations. It even more complicated due to the fact that Mr. Tom Wolfe himself is not even architect, I found it very interesting to see a man who didn't  study architecture, to  comments on buildings and architectures. Even though I still admire how he is able to have a great knowledge about architecture.

                Also, I found his opinion towards modern architecture, referred as "Glass Box" in the book, quite hard to except due to the fact that I personally liked it. I think it is personal opinion because it provides almost unlimited options for the users to be able to put whatever they preferred inside that space. But there is also a point that sometimes I agreed with him. he claimed that the "Glass Box" can also be an obstacle that really blocked new ideas and imaginations from the designers, which can be noticed in many areas around the country.

                 There is one point in the book that really caught my attention and suddenly become my favorite lesson from the book. "starting from zero", the phase that linked to the teaching where the book taught me about the soul of things. In the book, there are students tried to create their own piece of art by using newspaper, there are many amazing outcomes from those students, but the one that got picked is just a piece of paper folded to the tent. The story taught me that even this paper tent is the simplest but it is also the only one that really got the real characteristic (soul) of the paper, it express the true feelings of the paper.

                I think that it is a very interesting book to read, even it is a really confusing book but there are many great things that can be archived from it.