- This work tries to go beyond the two major tendencies to view building: (1) as objects that result from design and construction techniques (2) as objects that represent various practices and ideas. Leatherbarrow advocates to overcome (suspend) both technological and aesthetic styles of thinking, because both reduce architecture to our concepts and experiences of it. He believes that both way of seeing architecture lead to a kind of thinking that is reductive and inadequate because it recognizes only what it can predict. Rather, he encourages to think architecture as its internal performance or operation.
- The chapters on “unscripted performance,” “space in and out of architecture” are to me important because the former deals with the notion of “given appearance” and “exceeding topography”, whereas the latter well explains the distinction among terms “space,” “spaces,” and “spatiality.” The last two chapters are full of multiple arguments that still need further elaboration. For instance, the chapter on inside and outside came to the conclusion that, if we suspend our assumption about the unity of isotropic space and remain faithful to our concrete experience, we can begin to see that the perception of depth is not an interval between buildings, gardens, or streets, but functions as the media of their interconnection that integrates the perceiving subject, the streets, the building element, the surrounding vicinity, etc.
- The final chapter on “laws of meander” argues that the development modern spatial construction stemmed from the picturesque tradition. I do have a reservation to this idea, which is obviously in line with that of Caroline Constant.
LIYANG DING 