Courtesy of Wikimedia user Quibik PD. ImageAn elevation of the entire Acropolis as seen from the west; while the Parthenon dominates the scene, it is nonetheless only part of a greater composition. ImageCourtesy of Wikimedia user Quibik (Public Domain)

观点：建筑历史的建议
Opinion: A Plea for Architectural History

由专筑网李韧，邢子编译

本文最初发表于“Metropolis Magazine”，标题为“观点：我们不能再像以往那样教授建筑历史”。

上世纪70年代末的建筑学子一般在的欧洲与美国开启建筑生涯，对于建筑历史他们更是珍惜。在当时，几乎每个人都默认现代主义项目的失败，而后来的现代主义作品又在全球各地风靡，许多反对者都潜意识地将此视为灾难，同时许多人也想要重新表达原来20世纪现代主义鼎盛时期的内容，而那些内容曾经从设计文化中剥离。在一个设计工作室中，而不是在历史课堂中，我构思了第一个多立克柱头，但是我的老师却命令我将它去掉，而我也同意了。

另外，正如一些读者看到的那样，欧洲大多数城市当时所处于动荡时期，许多左派学生将设计看做是资本主义的行为，为了准备无产阶级革命，在上世纪70年代末，一些优秀的马克思主义建筑师被赋予了这样的期望，即设计建造出看起来难以实现的作品，亦或是根本就不需要设计就能够施工的作品，学生代表们如是说：“放下铅笔，学习Brunelleschi，应用Molotovs。”他们选择了Brunelleschi，而非Melnikov亦或是Hannes Meyer，他们将其视为当时西方苏维埃建筑的灵感，其中的原因在当时不得而知，也可能只是为了出名而已，这就好像发生在弗罗伦萨中部Brunelleschi广场的事件。

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "Opinion: We Can't Go on Teaching the Same History of Architecture as Before."
Architectural students of my generation—the last of the baby boomers, starting college in Europe or in the Americas in the late 1970s—had many good reasons to cherish architectural history. Everyone seemed to agree at the time that the Modernist project was conspicuously failing. Late Modernist monsters were then wreaking havoc on cities and lands around the world, and the most immediate, knee-jerk reaction against what many then saw as an ongoing catastrophe was to try and bring back all that 20th-century high Modernism had kicked out of design culture: history, for a start. I drew my first Doric capital, circa 1979, in a design studio, not in a history class (and my tutor immediately ordered me to scrape it, which I did).
Furthermore, that was—as some readers may remember—a time of social upheaval in most European countries. Many leftist students (and we all were, to various degrees) saw design as an act of complicity with the capitalist order of things. To prepare the proletarian revolution the good Marxist architect of the late 1970s was expected to design unbuildable buildings, or, better still, not to design at all: “drop your pencil, study Brunelleschi, and load your Molotovs,” I remember one of our student leaders shouting from a barricade. The reason why he chose Brunelleschi (and not Melnikov, for example, or Hannes Meyer) as the inspirational pastime of choice for the architect of the Western Soviets to come was not immediately clear and it was probably due to sheer toponymy, as that event happened in central Florence, in a square called Piazza Brunelleschi.


Image © James Taylor-Foster. ImageSanta Maria del Fiore, Florence.

尽管如此，许多人还是不再学习Brunelleschi以及其他一些大师课程，而这些课程比其他所谓的建筑学习都需要花费更长的时间。

在10年之后，我在阿尔卑斯山北部的一座建筑院校开始教授建筑历史，我惊讶地发现，建筑历史学家和他们的地区都有着相当不同的类别，人们普遍希望在建筑历史中加入自己的兴趣，尤其是一些古典主义传统，比如假设我曾经一定是一位罗马天主教徒，热爱秩序与军队，又或是一位贵族，而Périgord小型城堡如果能够服务于Le Primatice学校，那便太好了。

一些例子并非都是如此，我调查了那些假设的原因，后来我意识到，在欧洲的许多场所，建筑历史仍然是一些有着抽象集体特征的场地根源的可视化外部标记，即人物、种族、宗教、部落的象征，亦或是其他愿意在场地中保持传承的群体，他们总是认为，我们在这里，我们曾经也在这里，我们目睹了建筑的建造过程，见证了不同的人群与情绪。

这种浪漫的观点存在已久，有时无伤大雅，而有时则并非如此。许多人都死于90年代Balkans宗教战争中鲜血与祖国神秘结合的日耳曼意识形态，在这些错误的观点中，建筑历史观念同样能够毁人于无形，而且它们已经给很多人带来了负面作用。

Be that as it may, many of us ended up studying Brunelleschi, and other like masters, for much longer than needed for the purposes of any sound architectural training.
But when, barely 10 years later, I started teaching architectural history in a school of architecture north of the Alps, I found out, with some surprise, that architectural historians and their constituencies in that country were of a quite different ilk. The general expectation there was that, given my interest in the history of architecture in general, and of the classical tradition in particular, I must have been a Roman Catholic, with a sister in the Orders, and a brother in the army; an aristocrat, and the owner of at least a small castle in Périgord, better if attributed to the school of Le Primatice.
As none of the above was the case, I investigated the reasons for those assumptions, and I realized that, in many parts of Europe, the history of architecture was still often seen as the outward and visible sign of the territorial roots of some abstract, collective identity: the identity of a people, race, religion, or tribe—of any group willing to assert its hereditary rights on some portion of land, and claim: We are here; we have always been; look at the way we build, ye foreigners, and despair.
Such Romantic notions have been around for a long time; they are sometimes harmless, but sometimes not. From the Germanic ideology of a mystical union of blood and soil to the wars of religion in the Balkans in the ’90s, countless people have died because of these ideas. In the wrong hands, such views of architectural history can kill. They have already killed aplenty.


© Steve McCurry. ImageAl Shaheed Monument

在当时，后现代历史主义开始走向全球，随着这种观念的发展，许多事情应运而生，例如同时出现的建筑传统概念，这些概念常常来源于欧洲的建筑风格，即希腊式与罗马式风格、罗曼式风格、哥特式风格、文艺复兴、风格主义，以及巴洛克，简单来说，这些都是欧洲与美国大多数建筑院校所教授的历史大纲。但是永恒性与普遍性都是意识形态的滑坡。那么普遍性是如何发生呢？如果这种建筑传统风靡世界，那么它是否会比其他传统更加优越呢？

政治科学家也有着类似的意识形态问题，他们将此称为“Plato to NATO”，直到不久之前，“Plato to NATO”才成为了西方政治思想历史的标题。但是从雅典到华盛顿线性发展的概念也表明，民主、自由、科学的经典意识是西方繁荣的基础，至少是在NATO概念消失之前都是如此，而NATO自身则是一种近期更为意外的发展趋势。这个全球化、以西方为中心的建筑等价概念被冠以了“从维特鲁威到埃森曼”的主题，因为这是西方的经典，而这些经典对于每位建筑师来说都应该熟知。

That was also the time when postmodern historicism started going global, and with it, as often happens, rose some notion of the universality of the architectural tradition thus conveyed—which was, mostly, the European tradition: Greek and Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerism, and the Baroque—in short, the syllabus of the history survey then taught in most architectural schools in Europe and in the Americas. But timelessness and universality are slippery ideological slopes. Universality? How did that come to be? If indeed this architectural tradition has conquered the world, should we not assume that it is better, somehow, than all the others traditions that didn’t?
Political scientists have an expression to refer to a similar ideological conundrum. They call it the “Plato to NATO” issue. Until not long ago, “From Plato to NATO” could have been the actual title of a first-year survey on the history of Western political thought. But the notion of a steady linear progression from Athens to Washington also suggests that classical ideas of democracy, liberalism, and science are the foundation of the West’s prosperity and domination of the world (at least until the forthcoming elimination of NATO itself—a more recent, quite unexpected development). The architectural equivalent of this globalist, Western-centered syllabus could be titled “From Vitruvius to Eisenman.” For that is the Western canon that every architect around the world was supposed to be conversant with. Until recently.


© Peter Eisenman

在这方面西方地区更加慷慨与乐观，时代逐步发展，如今，过去的进步理论已经成为偏激思想家的攻击对象，这样的结果并不出乎意料，因为他们不断地赞颂西方价值的优越感，以及西方特征的优越感，在建筑学院或其他地方，没有人会想要成为那些价值理念党派的一员。这也是我们不再以“从维特鲁威到埃森曼”的方式来教授建筑历史的原因，当然其中也不会有扎哈，但是我们仍然希望能在历史名录中增加这么一位并非白人、并非男性的建筑师名字。

那么问题来了，一旦西方经典建筑逐步浮出水面，再加上当前的意识形态，似乎已经没有什么能够取代它们的地位。有的人会想要强调经典，这虽然很好，但是却具有挑战性。令人担忧的是，一些人并不接纳建筑历史，取而代之的是更加现代、更加具有共同意识的概念，例如水下呼吸潜水理论、史前时期估算理论，以及企鹅研究理论。

我想远离这些相关的话题，但是我们应该意识到，欧洲和美国的许多建筑院校培育出了一代建筑师，这些建筑师中不乏当今的知名建筑师，他们在毕业时甚至没有听说过诸如米开朗基罗（Michelangelo）、柯布西耶（Le Corbusier）等大师的名字，或者也从未见过哥特式教堂（Gothic cathedral）或密斯（Mies van der Rohe）的作品。那这是我们想要的结果吗？这对设计过程是否有好处呢？

The West could often be generous and enlightened—when it was winning. Times have changed. Today, what used to be a benign theory of teleological progress—supposedly self-evident—has turned into the aggressive stance of rabid ideologues and bigots advocating the superiority of Western values, and of Western identity—including architectural—against all others. None of us—or at least, no one I know, in schools of architecture or elsewhere—would want to be party to that nefarious plot. That’s why we can’t teach the history of architecture from Vitruvius to Eisenman any longer (nor to Zaha Hadid, for that matter; even though we may at least welcome the addition of a non-white, non-male name at the very end of the list).
The problem is that, once the Western architectural canon has been thrown overboard, together with its now unpalatable ideological ballast, nobody seems to know what else should replace it. Some have tried to expand the canon, which is an excellent and promising but challenging plan. More worryingly, many are simply doing away with all architectural history altogether, just to be on the safe side, and replacing it with trendy and vastly consensual topics such as the theory of scuba diving, the prehistory of computation, or penguin studies (I am not making that up).
Far from me to challenge the general relevance and import of such topics. Let us be aware, however, that in many schools of architecture in Europe and in the Americas, including some of the best, we are now—for the first time ever—training a generation of architects who may graduate without having ever even heard the names of Michelangelo or Le Corbusier, or without having ever seen a Gothic cathedral or a building by Mies van der Rohe. Are we sure that this is what we want? Is this good for design, and for the design professions?


© Marcel Gauthero. ImageConstruction of Brasilia, 1956 .

我认为并不应该这样。其中一个原因很简单，即建筑历史是以往存在的问题的解决方式，因此当今的许多学生都无视这些案例，在每个问题前浪费了许多时间，再进行重新构思，这让我觉得并不好。另外，随着社会的发展，经典的东西也在不断变化，而这些变化成果能够反过来应用在曾经的案例之中，取其精华去其糟粕，再适应现代问题与状况。这在曾经叫做“模仿”。

几个世纪以来，模仿与创造其实是两个不可分割的实体，它们无法单独存在。今天，没有人知道到底什么是模仿，因此即使人们刚好发现了与现状相符的先例，都只能单纯地去复制它，而非真正熟练地应用其中的精髓。Quatremère de Quincy对于摄影和PS软件一无所知，但是其模仿理论也许能够让我们获益良多。

I have a feeling it isn’t. One reason for that seems banally evident: the history of architecture is an inventory of solutions already found and problems already solved. So it grieves me very much to see so many students today waste so much time reinventing the wheel at every turn, due to their sheer ignorance of precedent. Besides, the classical tradition developed so many strategies and methods and tricks and tools over time precisely to assess those precedents, when relevant; then filter them, reinterpret them, and adapt them to the problem at hand. That used to be called imitation.
For centuries, imitation and creation were seen as inseparable: neither could exist without the other. Today, nobody knows what imitation means; so even when we happen to stumble upon some precedent worthy of our attention, most of the time we do not know what do with it, other than a photocopy (or a Photoshopped collage). Quatremère de Quincy knew nothing of photography, nor of Photoshop; yet his theory of imitation would still help us to make sense of both.


© MVRDV / The Why Factory. ImageA spread from The Why Factory's 2017 book, Copy Paste showing similarities between apparently "unique" buildings

当一天结束时，你经历的就是这一天的所有。有些历史很好，有些却并非如此，但是这都不重要，关键在于，建筑历史几乎是无限的范例仓库，建筑师可以任意从中获取灵感。但这仅仅只是个开始，历史不会重复，作品也是如此，因为重复的作品只是单纯地复制而已，并不会满足实际的状况。因此对于历史作品的无知是一件很可怕的事，但是如果只是单纯地模仿，那会更加糟糕，因为复制粘贴真的是一种非常愚蠢的学习方式。

For at the end of the day that is the whole point. It doesn’t matter that some history is good, and some ain’t. What matters is that the global history of architecture is an almost unlimited repository of precedents, which we can plunder at will if we have some notion of what’s out there. But that is only the start. History never repeats itself identically, so identical copies, as a rule, won’t serve any practical purpose. Ignorance of precedent is bad enough; photocopying, the zero degree of historicism, is possibly even worse. Cut and paste is a very dumb way of learning from precedent.


Courtesy of Wikimedia

作者简介：

Mario Carpo是伦敦大学学院（UCL）巴特莱特建筑学院建筑历史与理论的Reyner Banham教授，其最新的作品“第二次数字转变：超越智商的设计（The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence）”近期由麻省理工出版社出版。

Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett, UCL, London. His latest monograph, The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence, has just been published by the MIT Press.