“你好，黑暗！”为什么不是所有的建筑都需要营造开朗自由的氛围
"Hallo Darkness!" Why Not All Buildings Need To Be Cheerful All Of The Time

由专筑网邢子，杨帆编译

在这个世界中，“幸福”的建筑形象无所不在，而英国建筑师兼学术博士Timothy Brittain-Catlin则揭示了它的黑暗面，并说明了我们应当庆幸它存在的原因。

英国皇家建筑师学会（RIBA）主席在2017年3月号的研究期刊上说：“当代建筑物提倡开放、光明和自由流动的形体。这在当代的院校都被奉之为“真理”，但这却不是事实的陈述。基本上所有的建筑师和学生们都一直听到这些话， 但它们是真的吗？ 应该是真的吗？

对于建筑物应该营造开放自由氛围的说法是没有任何历史依据的。 Erik Gunnar的Asplund惊讶于哥德堡法院外在的乐观形态，因为它是第一个类似于这样的大型建筑：以前的法院大都是沉重、肃穆，甚至可能令人沮丧的。 许多建筑都是这样：有些显而易见，如教堂和石窟。建筑给人以神秘的感觉，包括那些参与者也可以理解他们的意图。

没有人会惊讶于出现在绘画或小说中的阴暗房子，许多其他媒体上对于建筑物的描绘也是沮丧、消极的。这不仅是因为低矮的天花板，也与狭小的窗户和缺乏想象力的描述相关，因为作家和艺术家将抑郁情绪看作与开朗的一样重要。 当然，他们也意识到，由黑暗转向光明过程中这种对比的感觉，可以令人兴奋。

In a world in which the "happy" architectural image feels all-pervasive, the British architect and academic Dr. Timothy Brittain-Catlin reveals its darker side suggesting why, and how, we might come to celebrate it.
"Contemporary buildings celebrate openness, light and free-flowing movement," says the President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in the March 2017 issue of the Institute’s journal. This is what at my school we call an "announcement", rather than a statement of fact. Indeed, all architects and architecture students hear these words all the time. But are they true? Should they be?
There’s no historical justification for the assertion that buildings should “celebrate” any kind of openness, or indeed any kind of cheerful feeling. Erik Gunnar’s Asplund’s upbeat extension to the court house in Gothenburg was astonishing because it was the first major building of its type to be like this: previously court houses were designed to be heavy, stifling, possibly even depressing or puzzling. Many buildings were: some obviously so, such as mortuary chapels and grottoes. Freemasons’ lodges were intended to be enigmatic so that masons and not intruders could comprehend them.
No one is surprised that houses that appear in paintings, or in novels, are depressing. It is a fair bet that as many depictions of buildings in other media are downbeat, dark or forbidding, as the opposite. Not only because they have low ceilings and poky windows in the way that unimaginative speculative housing often does, but because writers and artists see depressive emotions as being as important as cheerful ones. And of course they also realized that the evocation of contrasting feelings, such as through a long dark entry to a bright room, can be elating.

Image via Google Cultural Institute / Wikimedia Commons

看看约翰•埃弗里特•米莱斯（John Everett Millais）1851年画的马里亚纳。 这是莎士比亚著作《量罪记》中的女主人公，她在嫁妆丢失后被未婚夫拒婚，剥削了政治权利。房间的建筑通过彩色玻璃和墙壁深处的阴影来表达她的悲剧。 显而易见的是，如果Mariana位于开放明亮的房间将是荒谬的。如果所有的房间都具有相同的特征，那么它们之间的感觉就不会有差异。

Look at John Everett Millais’ 1851 painting Mariana. This is the heroine from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, who was rejected by her fiancé after her dowry is lost, only to be exploited by the political powers in her city. The architecture of the room expresses her tragedy through the stained glass and the deep shadows created in the wall. It is obvious that a Mariana standing in one of the RIBA president’s cheerful rooms would be ridiculous. It is also obvious that if all rooms were to have the same character, there wouldn’t be scope for expressing any difference of feeling between them.

Image © Paul Highnam

这样做的原因是建筑物“应该”反映真实的生活周期。这意味着它不仅代表每天不同的心情，也包含了生活和历史的主题。那样，除了建筑评论家以外的人们会理解建筑，并且生活也将更加丰富。John Outram最近告诉我，他设计的图画是从人类学研究中得出的 —— 不同人民的生活方式及其伴随的符号。背后的理解是，如果设计师可以借鉴已经发展了数百年的古老思想和符号，那么没有特定专门教育的人就会了解它们的内容和与之相关的事物。一座大楼可以用大教堂的方式表达，像1980年代后现代主义再次出现的许多其他东西一样，这是维多利亚时期或爱德华时期的一个晚期思想，由WR Lethaby在1891年的建筑中诉说。最好的建筑为人们提供了不同层次的想法：新鲜的，继承性的或者说明性的。有时给予年轻小说家努力从死胡同发展叙事的一些建议就是设计一个故事里两个最不可能的人物之间的对手戏，这种方法曾经服务于欧洲最伟大的历史建筑师。

The reason for this is that if buildings “should” be doing anything, they “should” be reflecting the real cycles of life. That means not just different daily moods, but also the themes of life and history. That way people other than architecture critics will understand them and be enriched by them. John Outram recently told me how the iconographies he devises are drawn from a lifetime’s study of ethnography – the patterns of life of different peoples and the symbols that accompany them. The understanding behind this is that if a designer can draw on ancient ideas and symbols that have developed over hundreds of years, people with no particular specialist education will understand something from them and relate to them. A building can then speak back to them, in the way that a cathedral does. Like much else that re-emerged in 1980s postmodernism, this was a late Victorian or Edwardian idea, carefully and slowly told by W.R. Lethaby in his Architecture, Mysticism and Myth of 1891. The best architecture provides a layering of ideas: some fresh, some inherited, some interpreted. Just making shapes won’t do it. A piece of advice sometimes given to young novelists struggling to develop their narrative out of a dead end is to contrive a meeting between the story’s two most improbable characters. Look around and see how well this approach once served some of Europe’s greatest historical architects.

Image © Paul Highnam

Image © Paul Highnam

人们越来越意识到，情绪的变化可以丰富建筑，这使得当前对新古典主义建筑兴趣的兴起比以前更加激动人心。 现代主义只有一条关于古典建筑的定义：它的时代已经结束。 但是，如今最好的新古典主义已经在逐步发展中形成了：比如Craig Hamilton最近在威尔士的房子里添加的东西，还有位于牛津郡的小教堂，以及剑桥的Gonville和Caius College的John Simpson的餐厅。 汉密尔顿的新迎宾大厅，其神秘的天窗，单柱和没有栏杆的楼梯，增加了访客和房屋私人区域之间的距离感。

It is the greater awareness of the idea that variations of mood can enrich building that has made the current upsurge of interest in neo-classical architecture much more exciting than it previously seemed. Modernism had one line only about classical architecture: that its time was over. But the best neo-classicists today are already imaginatively playing with mood: see for example Craig Hamilton’s recent additions to his own house in Wales, or his chapel in Oxfordshire, and John Simpson’s fellows’ dining room at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Hamilton’s new entry hall, with its mysterious skylights, single column, and stair with no balustrade presents a wonderful sense of distance between the visitor and the private areas of the house.

对于年轻的设计师，可能需要寻找能带给他们灵感来源的事物，而James Stevens Curl的书籍“共济会”和“启蒙运动”已经成为一种圣经。 死亡建筑的扭曲不仅描述了整个历史上的共济会民俗，而且还追溯到了这些神秘的奥秘的起源 ——也就是说，他们积累的神话和仪式，以及用于描绘它们的建筑。在这里，在数十个大多数十八世纪的雕刻中，是破碎的石柱，洞悉一切的眼睛，被破坏的金字塔，纪念碑和坟墓。在某些情况下，这些特征被有序地安排，以便通过它们的人被暗示一种宗教情绪。

这些特征具有悲剧性的气氛，因为它们代表着Curl的解释，建筑往往是与社会脱节的。 因此，死亡或永久审判和折磨的象征本来应该是代表永恒，超越日常生活的挫折和某种政治或宗教领袖是有关联的。 这些建筑让外部人士或未受教育的人通过建筑物了解信息，从而也提升自己的地位。

For younger designers looking for ideas about where this might take them, James Stevens Curl’s fascinating and masterful book Freemasonry and the Enlightenment has become something of a bible. Curl, who has published a great deal on the architecture of death, not only describes the masonic lodges themselves throughout history (and that is interesting enough) but also traces the origins of the masons’ Mysteries – that is, their accumulated myths and ceremonies, and the architectural symbols used to depict and them. Here, in hundreds of mostly eighteenth-century engravings, are the broken columns, the all-seeing eyes, the ruined pyramids, the cenotaphs, the sepulchres and tombs, both inside buildings and across landscapes. In some cases, these features are arranged mnemonically so that a person passing through them might be reminded of the architectural sequences of Solomon’s temple or a pharaonic tomb.
These features have a tragic air because they represent, in Curl’s interpretation, the masons’ battle against the philistinism and mob rule prevalent in the societies in which they were devised (and, he adds, as if addressing Brexit, “that is given so much credence in the twenty-first century”). It therefore makes sense that the symbols of death or perpetual trial and torment should have been intended to represent eternity, the thing that goes on beyond the frustrations of day-to-day life and the petty concerns of a certain kind of political or religious leader. To have a building made from symbols and forms that outsiders or uneducated people do not understand can furthermore be gratifying and rewarding for the designer who thereby can also add to their own elevated status, the part of the profession that no “project manager” will ever usurp.

Image © Patrick O’Keeffe

现代主义者的历史建筑师是John Soane。 也许是因为他的建筑物可以被描述为勒柯布西耶的空洞的对应面，就像“精妙的光明的集合，恰似正当和宏伟的戏剧”一样。 事实上，玛格丽特•理查森（Margaret Richardson）和（MaryAnne Stevens）将“安东尼”的书命名为“空间与光之师”，而不是“大胆和死亡之王”，因为这将阻止大多数出版商出版生产。 光通过间接过滤，通过彩色玻璃的过滤，再进入室内。Soane设计的一些最著名的空间，包括在他自己的房子里，像陵墓一样的空间。 他的设计思想是这样的：人们被压倒在建筑物所创造的神秘氛围中。 相比之下，哥特复兴主义者和他们的现代主义继承人一直在谈论建筑物如何向上的话题。

The only historical architect whom modernists seem to have accepted is John Soane. Perhaps it is because his buildings can be described, in Le Corbusier’s hollow, echoing phrase, as the “masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”. Indeed, Margaret Richardson and MaryAnne Stevens’ definitive book about Soane is called Master of Space and Light rather than Master of Gloom and Death, which would have deterred most publishers. But this light filtered through indirectly, and through colored glass; some of the best known spaces that Soane designed, including in his own house, were mausoleums or designed to look like them. His plans have a weighty and labyrinthine quality: a sense that people are pressed downwards within a building seems to have been a recurring theme in the architecture of the Mysteries. Whereas by contrast the Gothic Revivalists and their modernist successors talked all the time about elation and building upwards towards the sun.

Image © Patrick O’Keeffe

18世纪后期的新古典主义建筑又出现了一个悲剧性的局面：回想起来，注定要被哥特式、工业建筑、现代主义所取代，直到最终完成对早期建筑的模仿。 然而现在又回来了，新现代主义从业者正面临着似乎充满阳光但实则危险的局面。

There was another tragic aspect to late eighteenth-century neoclassical architecture: we know in retrospect that it was doomed to die out, to be replaced by gothic, by industrial construction systems, by modernism, until finally it became a parody of its earlier self. Yet now it is back, and the eternal sunshine of the neo-Modernist practitioner is in danger of becoming the architecture of the grinning idiot.


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