Everywhere one ventures in cities, skyscrapers arebeing built or planned. Even Paris is getting one. TheFrench capital last week backed plans for a 180-metre high triangular tower by Herzog &de Meuron of Switzerland, its first in four decades.
There may never have been a better time to be an ambitious young architect. For an officeskyscraper at the World Trade Center site in New York, James Murdoch, scion of the mediadynasty, has just replaced a design by Britain’s venerable Lord Foster with a jazzier idea byBjarke Ingels, the 40-year-old Danish architect.
There is plenty of work to go around for any global “starchitect” who can produce an iconicmuseum, office or residential tower from London to Chongqing. Mr Ingels is building a campusfor Google with Thomas Heatherwick, the UK designer; Herzog & de Meuron are toremodel Chelsea’s football stadium; Rafael Viñoly is finishing an apartment block at 432 ParkAvenue that is New York’s second-tallest building.
Every first-tier global city, and many a second and third-tier one in Asia, wants to put itself onthe map with an iconic tower, or several. This creates plenty of strange shapes on the skyline —a firm of architects in Melbourne has just unveiled plans for an undulating 68-storey apartmentand hotel block inspired by the fabric-clad dancers in a Beyoncé video.
Such expressions of architectural individuality have the paradoxical effect of making citieslook more and more like each other. Once upon a time, Chicago and New York wereskyscraper-villes, while European capitals such as Paris and London had muted streetscapes.Now, many are converging on what Rem Koolhaas, the avant-garde architect, dubbed “thegeneric city”.
This worries some designers. Moshe Safdie, the Israeli-American architect who has designedtowers in cities including Chongqing, says some skyscrapers are “objectified, branded ego trips”that are more like giant sculptures than buildings forming parts of a public space. In Asia, “hundreds of towers are being built but you do not get a city from it, just individual pieces”.
The advantage is that the best new towers are superior to what came before — an era ofsecond-rate modernism in which skyscrapers were designed by the large, anonymousarchitecture firms that still build most offices and infrastructure. The centres of many cities arestuffed with buildings designed mainly to hold bank trading floors.
The City of London’s skyline is sprouting unusual shapes, from Lord Rogers’ “Cheesegrater”Leadenhall Building to Mr Viñoly’s “Walkie Talkie” at 20 Fenchurch Street. But both beat themundane blocks that dominate Canary Wharf and other financial hubs. The rapid expansionof global finance in the two decades up to 2008 created many boring monuments.
One symbol of changing times is Two World Trade Center, Mr Ingels’ design for 21st CenturyFox and News Corp’s headquarters. Lord Foster’s tower, topped by diamond-shaped panes,was designed with banks in mind. Mr Ingels’ replacement is a stack of cubes mirroringTribeca’s streets while offering a smooth face to the memorial site.
時(shí)代變化的一個(gè)標(biāo)志是英厄爾斯為21世紀(jì)福克斯(21st Century Fox)和新聞集團(tuán)(News Corp)總部設(shè)計(jì)的世貿(mào)中心二號(hào)大樓(Two World Trade Center)。福斯特勛爵菱形屋頂?shù)捻敳吭O(shè)計(jì)是為銀行設(shè)計(jì)的。英厄爾斯的替代方案是一堆可以反射翠貝卡街區(qū)(Tribeca,紐約市曼哈頓下城的一個(gè)街區(qū)——譯者注)的立方體,同時(shí)為紀(jì)念遺址留下平滑的一面。
Media and technology companies — the city’s rising forces — are more imaginative clients thanbanks. They do not want a plain skyscraper but something smarter that they can show off.The pioneer of this trend in New York was Frank Gehry’s curvy IAC building, and Mr Ingels sayssuch buildings “must accommodate diversity, so a single extruded form does not make thecut”.
Another set of demanding clients are high-end property developers, who can secure higherprices if an apartment block has been stamped by a “starchitect”. Mr Gehry and Mr Viñoly havedesigned such blocks in New York; while Herzog & de Meuron’s new Paris building, with itsglass triangle echoing IM Pei’s Louvre pyramid, will hold office space and a hotel.
The proliferation of skyscrapers has its problems. One is that many are being built but only asmall number by the most thoughtful architects. Many Asian and Middle Eastern cities are fillingwith what Mr Ingels calls “perfume bottle” designs — flamboyant towers intended to attractattention rather than to respond to the local setting.
Mr Koolhaas celebrated the notion of cities being “liberated from the captivity of identity”, butthat looks better on paper than set in concrete. There used to be no difficulty in knowingwhether you were in London or Paris, or which continent you were on, but many cities nowresemble a mash-up between Hong Kong and Las Vegas.
The second problem is the one identified by Mr Safdie: that towers are individual sculpturesrather than buildings that form part of a streetscape. The best-loved urban constructions areoften terraces and rows of houses not single buildings.
This may be inevitable — attempts at central planning of cities in the 1960s and 1970s byrazing streets and building towers mostly turned out to be a disaster. For better or worse, thisis the era of individual patronage, of tenants commissioning their own fortresses.
Yet the best architecture is often the quietest, taking what is there and knitting it into a publicspace — from the High Line park in New York to the restoration of King’s Cross station inLondon. You would not notice either from a distance, but they matter.
不過(guò),最好的建筑往往是最不顯眼的——從紐約的高線公園(High Line Park)到整修一新的倫敦國(guó)王十字車(chē)站,它們都無(wú)縫融入公共空間。從遠(yuǎn)處,你不會(huì)注意到它們,但它們很重要。