为什么建筑师应当开始为自己考虑?
Why Architects Should Start Being a Little More Selfish

由专筑网邢子，李韧编译

苏格兰的自由主义经济学家和哲学家亚当•斯密（Adam Smith）曾经说过：“为别人而感到自豪，为自己克制、抑制自私，行使仁慈的情感，构成了完美的人性。”自17世纪以来，“自私”被许多人视为人类最丑恶的特征之一。

然而，随着正念的兴起，以及蓬勃发展的独立社会生活，人们对“自私”的看法逐渐发生了改变，“自私”更多地被称为“自我照顾”，但这并不一定是件坏事。

正念的主要信条之一告诉我们，在对别人有同情心的时候，我们也应该对自己有同情心。这个理论认为，如果我们首先爱自己，那么就更加容易善待和爱他人。

对我们自己的善举并不需要多么伟大，它们可以像烹饪一顿丰盛的美食一样简单，即使已经焦头烂额，但仍然可以花点时间享受它，花20分钟看一本小说，或者让自己尽早入睡，都是不错的方式。

然而，大多数建筑师可能会承认他们并不崇尚这个理念。我们工作到深夜，往往没有报酬。我们制作数百张图纸，只为满意的答复。我们在构思项目时，甲方的某些需求或反应看上去似乎对我们自己有些残忍。有的同事为了工作废寝忘食，他们来得很早，不吃午饭，所有这些都是为了确保一栋建筑的稳定以及安全，无论多么棘手的问题都尽力去解决。

有一个有力的论点说是建筑师的受虐倾向诞生于大学。我的一位正在攻读硕士学位的朋友最近告诉我，学生们是如何工作的，甚至到了凌晨五点，也不会有人想要回去休息。她继续解释说，她觉得自己“垫着脚尖在刀山上行走”。当我在大学讲课时，我从学生那里得到的一般反馈是，他们没有人认为自己足够优秀，对自己的工作远比对其他人的工作要求更加苛刻，因此，对自己的不友好开始于我们职业生涯的初始阶段。

这种缺乏自我怜悯渗透到我们生活的每一个方面。我们使自己过得很悲惨。 我们睡得很糟、吃得不好，我们陪伴自己的家人和朋友的时间很少。我在英国工作的地方有38％的30岁以下建筑师认为，心理健康是他们最关心的问题（根据AJ Life的社会调研），52％的建筑系学生出现一定的心理问题，并且这一趋势将在未来几年还将继续下去。

此外，几乎没有证据表明，每周工作超过40小时，可以帮助我们更好地处理工作问题。当工作人员经常加班超过这个数字时，疾病发生率增加，幸福感下降，动力减少。英国企业每年损失49％的工作日是工作压力的结果。因此，每周工作60个小时不仅对我们无利，而且在工作效率或产出方面没有任何意义，这是英国经济学一直争论的问题。

所以，现在看来，建筑师们应该已经得到相应的教训，2018年我们必须改变战略，更多地陪伴我们的朋友和家人，让我们按时下班吧，让我们更快乐，多为自己考虑，虽然也许会减少一定的工作量，但身心的健康更重要，不是吗？

The Scottish liberal economist and philosopher Adam Smith once argued: “To feel much for others and little for ourselves, to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.” While we may have come some way since the 1700s, selfishness is still viewed by many as one of humanity’s ugliest traits.
Yet with the rise of mindfulness and the burgeoning self-help and life-coach industry, the view towards selfishness—more palatably referred to as "self-care"—is changing, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
One of the main tenets of mindfulness teaches us that in being compassionate to others, we should also be compassionate to ourselves. The theory goes that it is much easier to be kind and loving to others if we are first kind and loving to ourselves.
Acts of kindness to ourselves do not need to be grand gestures. They can be as simple as cooking a wholesome meal and taking the time to enjoy it, spending twenty minutes reading a novel, or allowing ourselves to get an early night, despite that looming deadline.
However, most architects would probably admit they don’t adhere to this mantra in any shape or form. We work late nights, often unpaid. We produce hundreds of drawings to get to one final plan. We treat ourselves with no compassion while we pay our projects or, on occasion (but certainly not always), the client unwavering attention. Many of us know a colleague that cares more about brick details than their own mental stability. They come in early, leave late and don’t stop for lunch, all to ensure that a building’s inhabitants will truly never find the movement joints, no matter how hard they look.
There is a strong argument to be made that the masochistic philosophy of the architect is born at University. A friend of mine who is currently undertaking her Master's degree recently told me how students were working until 5 am—in the first term—as nobody wanted to be the first to leave. She went on to explain that she felt like she was “in a blender, trying to not to let my feet touch the blades at the bottom.” When I lecture at universities, the general feedback I hear from students is that they don’t believe they are good enough, and are far, far more critical about their own work than they ever would be about anybody else’s. Unkindness towards ourselves starts at this nascent stage of our careers.
This lack of self-compassion permeates every aspect of our lives. We make ourselves miserable. We sleep badly—if at all. We don’t eat properly. We see less of our family and friends than we should. Where I work in the UK, 38% of architects under 30 say that mental health is their biggest workplace concern (according to the AJ Life in Practice Survey), and with 52% of architecture students having received or worried they will need to receive help for their mental health, this trend is set to continue in the coming years.
Furthermore, there’s little evidence to show that spending more than 40 hours a week working offers much benefit in terms of productivity. When staff regularly exceed this, sickness rates increase, happiness drops, and motivation decreases. An estimated 49% of working days lost by UK businesses each year are a result of work-related stress. Regularly working 60-hours weeks is therefore not only bad for us, it doesn’t make any sense in terms of productivity or output—a problem that the British economy continues to battle with.
So, it seems that the time has come for us architects to take on board some of the lessons of self-care that mindfulness teaches. 2018 must be the year that we as architects and students take lunch breaks and see more of our friends and family. Let’s leave the office before our boss does. Let’s be happier, and let’s be more selfish. I doubt our designs will suffer because of it.


出处：本文译自www.archdaily.com/，转载请注明出处。