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好建筑是接受历史的成果——或者通过复制历史而诞生
Good Architecture Is Not Produced by Rejecting History—Or by Replicating it, Either

由专筑网缕夕，李韧编译

本文最初发表于Common Edge，标题为“建筑忽视历史自身的危险”。

重力无处不在。例如我们的体重，站起来的时候、举起包裹的时候，都能感受到重力。对于建筑师来说，重力具有特殊的含义，它是基本结构的要素。天气、能源和材料都很重要，但这些都特定于当地的现实环境。

重力永恒存在。但是在设计中还有另外一个通用元素，那便是历史，这是所有事物的发展媒介。 无论是以何种方式建造或完成建筑，历史都是存在“因素”，不可否认，它总是建筑师的部分设计思路。

这对于建筑学来说是个艰难的突破，针对历史元素，我们拿饮食作比喻。人是铁，饭是钢，但是一些肉食的引用并不健康，也不道德，吃下肉食，我们可以从中获得相应的能量，但这对素食主义者来说却实在难以接受，而对于有的人来说，汉堡包与包子也没有区别。

建筑同样如此。有的建筑师完全将历史置之不理，这就像素食主义者对任何肉食的态度，而有的建筑师的设计则充分结合历史，这就类比有的人只是单纯地将肉食看做蛋白质。

世界上的一些历史观念并不会意识到这些道理。

建筑的历史比这些简单的道理更为复杂。历史是一个模糊的概念，不似20世纪以前和后现代美学中的“当时”和“现在”的分类这样的明晰。历史和时间必然存在。无论效果图多么好看，建筑师都不会因此停下他们的脚步。我们无法控制未来的历史。

现在是结束幻想的时候了。建筑师不会创造历史，但我们会回应它，就像我们对重力做出反应一样。

建筑师很容易将历史作为工具，避免在没有时间要素的环境中创造更坚固的真理。建筑是我们的文化浓缩，它并不是空穴来风，也不是照搬抄袭。但是如果没有对过去进行模仿，建筑的发展也不会如此之快，没有抽象的美学就无法衬托现实世界。

人工智能将很快普及，而美学理念可以为我们的文化提供创造力，但无论何种风格，技术都只是单纯模仿而已。

但无论我们采用哪种思维模式，技术多少都会对建筑产生影响。不会有人直接说“我们需要更高的建筑物，让我们发明钢铁。”但钢铁仍然产生了，摩天大楼的发展因此也突飞猛进，那么这一历史事实也改变了许多客观实际：中央供暖、外墙、电力、电梯。每一次技术变革都会带来美学上的提升，如果好好利用，它会给我们带来视觉和功能上的创新。

我的猜测是，本世纪的技术动向将转向人工智能。这个时代，人们已经将战场无声地转移到推特等社交平台上，人类创造力无疑至关重要，也是历史上最真实的存在。这意味着建筑师、建筑媒体和学术界都可以从中获益，展望未来蓝图。

建筑学在训练、实践和出版方面的深度需要充分地参考历史，而不是像单一的项目那样独来独往。换句话说，我们应该跳出当前的定向思维。

在当今的文化中，有些具体的建筑思维方式并没有互相影响。在媒体的曝光下，这些区别仍然显而易见，它们赞扬建筑表达两极思维的方式，但一些网站和杂志所发布的美学思维将人们带入一个定向的模式，所以我们也许应该让更多的建筑作品公诸于世。在我所去过的地方，以及我所认识的人们当中，经常有争论的产生，但这却是处理历史问题的方式。因此，在建筑学院的教学中，就应当具有多样的审美特性，例如聘请建筑师来介绍不同的思维模式，从抽象主义到民族主义，再到历史主义和技术官僚，以及其他的一切。

我相信有些人认为当前世界存在多样性，其中的区别仅仅是偏好而已，就好比拿起一本杂志、看一个博客，或去参与学校的评图。历史崇拜和历史否定之间的区别在这其中非常明显。历史本身并没有推崇或否认自己，因为历史就是我们的文化，而不仅仅是我们喜欢的部分。我想，要么在教学、分享之中开辟新思路，或者跟随未来的发展随遇而安。

当变革变得激进和普遍，那么就没有简单的答案了。我们知道的只是未知永远存在。有经验的建筑师也无法知道未来会出现哪些问题，但他们知道的是该如何解决当下存在的问题。

随着时代的发展，世界的创造力将随处可见。如果只是跟着导航盲目前行，那么历史的盛况将再也与我们无关，同时，我们也不会了解到未来发展能有多精彩。如果我们仅仅相信技术自身，我们就会忽视历史本质的重要作用。

忘记历史就像忘记重力，建筑师不能隐瞒历史的事实。勒•柯布西耶的巴黎构想并未成为城市的未来。历史是一切的基础，仅仅因为它客观存在，它并不是一种风格。在建筑中，我们倾向于运用历史的表面美学，但照搬照抄显然无效，就像只要乐章和旋律必须配合，才能演绎出打动人心的音乐作品。

Duo Dickinson是入行30多年的建筑师。他拥有8本著作，同时也是New Haven Register的建筑评论家，曾为Hartford Courant撰写论文，并在意大利索伦托Sant'Anna Institute的建筑美学项目中担任教职员工。

This article was originally published by Common Edge as "Architecture Ignores History At Its Own Peril."
Gravity is undeniable. We stand, lift packages, wince when we see our weight on the scale. For architects, gravity has special meaning: it is the essential force to be dealt with. Weather, energy, materials all matter too—but those all have local realities specific to their location.
Gravity is the forever constant. But there is another universal element in design: history, the role of what has passed from idea to reality in all things, everywhere. Whether there are “reasons” for a building being formed or finished in a certain way, the undeniable lens of history is always part of how designers think about what’s to be built.
There is a hard break in architecture: dealing with history is a little like eating food. We all have to eat, but to some eating meat is both unhealthy and immoral; killing another animal when plants are available for calories becomes the hardest of convictions. For others a hamburger is no different than the bun that surrounds it.
Architecture is similarly bipolar. Either history is fully rejected like a Vegan’s take on any animal-based food, or history is the basis of design, like meat is the essential protein in a carnivore’s diet.
Both fundamental takes on history do not recognize essential truths.
The loss of history in architectural design is worse than these simplistic styles. History is a constant, not a “then” and “now” sorter of pre-20th-century and post-contemporary aesthetics. History, and time, is a given, an inevitability. No matter how seductive the fresh image is, architects do not freeze time. We do not control future history.
It is time to end the magical thinking. Architects do not create and shape history, we respond to it: just like we respond to gravity.
It is easy for designers to use history as a crutch or a whipping boy, and avoid the harder truth that no building is created in a vacuum of time. Buildings are of our culture, neither unprecedented nor replicated. No imitation of the past makes new buildings anything other than new. No abstract aesthetic can effectively deny the world that surrounds it.
The advent of Artificial Intelligence will happen soon enough, and the only legitimate value beyond aesthetics architecture can offer our culture will be the human creativity that no technology can imitate, regardless of style.
Technology changes buildings, no matter what magical thinking of style-based rationalization we apply. No one said, “We need taller buildings, let’s invent steel.” Steel happened and skyscrapers resulted from it. That historic fact changed everything: central heating, facades, electricity, elevators. Every technological change creates aesthetic change, because if used it has visual and functional realities.
My guess is that this century’s technological upheaval will pivot off of AI. In this era where our cultural literacy often devolves to the depth of a Twitter war, the only way human creativity is undeniably important is in the truth of its reality in history. That means that architects, the architectural media and the academic engine could all benefit from a pause from their defensive rituals and look at the larger picture.
The breadth of architecture in training, practice and publication needs to be as diverse as history, not as self-serving and exclusive as any individual project’s polemic. That means putting an end to the present style-conscious sorting of what is celebrated and taught.
There are specific ways of thinking about architecture that are simply not interacting in today’s culture. These distinctions are evident in the institutions that are full of media exposure, that laud the teaching of the bipolar mindset of architectural expression. But websites and magazines publish very consistent aesthetics, so why not open up editorial policies to provide exposures of every “type”? In the places I have been, and the people that I know, there is often lip service but an aesthetic herding to one of the two paths of dealing with history (love and hate). So schools need to explore aesthetic diversity, and hire designers as teachers with a range of outlooks—from abstract, to ethnocentric, to historicist and technocratic—and everything in between.
I am sure there are those who loudly declare that we have diversity now, that the distinctions are simply diversions of preference, but pick up a magazine, or look at a blog, go to a design jury at a college. The segregation of approaches between the history-worshipping and the history-denying is pretty effective between these institutions. History itself does not reference or deny itself: because history is what all our culture is, not just the parts we prefer. I think we either open up our bandwidth to reflect all of architecture in our teaching, sharing and making of buildings, or the coming universal sorter of AI will make choices for us: like the predetermined routes on our GPS.  
There are no easy answers for a time when change will be radical and pervasive. We know just enough to know what we don’t yet know. Older architects cannot know what the questions will be in the next generation’s unavoidable melding with A.I., but this older architect can see how our natural impulse to create “style” as a defense mechanism is a dinosaur of my time.
The facts of perspective and creativity can become mute and invisible in the coming tidal wave. If we defer to what is as easy as our GPS, we cease to see the landscape of history, and do not know where we’re going—simply because we do not need to. If we come to trust only what is provided by the technology alone, we willfully ignore the vital creativity that is the essence of our history.
Forgetting history would be like forgetting gravity. Architects can’t hide from the facts that history provides. Le Corbusier’s vision for Paris did not become the city’s urban future. Yale’s new residential colleges are not old. History is a part of everything, because it is the truth, not a style. In architecture, we tend to use the superficial aesthetics seen in history as a way to justify the wrecking or the reproduction of the past. But the new does not exist to simply invalidate or replicate the old. Meter and melody have to work together, or there is no music, frozen or otherwise.
Duo Dickinson has been an architect for more than 30 years. The author of eight books, he is the architecture critic for the New Haven Register, writes on design and culture for the Hartford Courant, and is on the faculty at the Building Beauty Program at Sant'Anna Institute in Sorrento, Italy.


出处：本文译自www.archdaily.com/，转载请注明出处。