城市住宅
On Urban Housing

建筑师设计城市的住宅是最近才兴起的，此风气也体现了现代化的进退维谷的核心矛盾。
Urban housing designed by architects is a relatively recent phenomenon, and therein may lie the essence of our modern dilemma.

传统上，住宅顶多算是建筑业的二流科目。建筑师们首先把他们的注意力放在公共建筑上面。建筑师们经常为一些贵族和有钱人设计宫殿和联排的房屋，但是其他的住宅和房屋都由一般的工匠来完成。因此，住宅不再从属于理论与艺术的范畴，而能够以较缓慢的步调随传统一道演进，比方说，能符合人们的生活连贯性以及能维系人们生活的都市形式。
Traditionally, housing was at best a second genre of architectural activity. The primary focus of architects' efforts were public buildings. Although architects often designed town houses and palaces for wealthy and/or noble families, other houses and housing were done by builders. Thus, housing was excused from the necessity (burden) of theory and art and was free to evolve within the slower norms of convention; i.e., close to the continuity of people's lives and the urban forms that support them.

然而，十八世纪的法国建筑师受到越来越多的有知识的、有品味的、和有钱的人追捧，以要求建造一些联排式的房子。在十九世纪城市人口大膨胀的环境下，这种趋势，极大地推动了法国的公寓房和英国的租赁房的发展。建筑师们是中产阶级房屋造型发展的核心，但是他们的最主要的任务还是建设宏伟的市政建筑。事实上，十八世纪巴黎的公寓房和佐治亚式的阳台呈现出来的艺术是如此地具有普遍性以至于其几乎足以成为城市的一个表征。诚然，法式及英式住宅模型为布尔乔亚式的美国都市提供了基础。
In eighteenth century France, however, architects found an expanding and enlightened clientele for town and country houses in the increasing numbers of people with access to knowledge, taste, and money. This led rather directly to the development of the apartment house in France and the terrace house in England as urban population expanded rapidly in the nineteenth-century. Architects were central to the development of these middle class housing types, but their primary commissions were still great civic buildings. In fact, the art of the nineteenth-century Parisian apartment building and the Georgian terrace became so ubiquitous as to almost qualify as a kind of urban vernacular. Certainly these French and English housing models provided the basis for housing in burgeoning urban America.

尽管如此，现代主义者打破了这一切。到了二十世纪，建筑师们不仅仅把注意力转向了住宅，还指向了大众和低收入者的住房问题。于是，向来为建筑思想所忽视的城市住宅突然间受到了理论和艺术的关注。这一变革引发了一系列难题，至今仍未解决。新型（通常是反都市的）和新风格（抽象的）外加一个新步骤（渐增和从里到外的，而不是递减和从外到里的）出乎意料地戳破了一个看似幻觉但又美好的未来的景象。城市区划法是城市传统的守卫者，渐渐地被修改并促进了世界新秩序的产生。到二十世纪70年代初，这样的例子已经比比皆是。一般来说，尽管这些建筑与理想的房子相比，都较肥大，矮小，颜色较暗，线条也没那么优雅，但却描绘了一种全新的住宅模式。
Modernism changed all that, however. In the twentieth-century architects directed their attention not only to housing, but to problems of mass, or low income, housing. Thus, urban forms that had never benefited from self conscious architectural attention were the sudden recipients of both theory and art. This revolutionary change created a series of difficult issues that are with us still. New types (frequently anti-urban) and a new style (abstract) coupled with a new process (additive and inside-out rather than reductive and outside-in) produced shocking discontinuities despite being based on the promise of an illusive but better future. Zoning laws, the guard dogs of urban convention, were gradually changed to assist in the birth of the new world order, and by the early 1970's examples were built all over the world. Generally they were fatter, stumpier, less white, and less elegant than the ideal models, but they delineated a new set of conventions nevertheless.

或许由于美国人在二战后蜂拥而上地搬到郊区，或许因为美国人骨子里面对如何城市住宅样式的厌恶，以至于美国现代主义者的项目极其显著地呈现出社会经济学上的奢侈特征以及项目性。
Perhaps because of the American flight to the suburbs after the second world war, and because of a fundamental American antipathy towards urban housing of any kind, modernist projects (in America) carried conspicuously visible socioeconomic connotations of either luxury or the projects.

美国现代主义者建造的房屋或在二十世纪七十年代早期就已登峰造极，尼克松总统在1972年一月更是打了最漂亮的一仗：扼杀当时美国的公共小型住宅的政策。（Roger Sherwood《现代住宅原型》，1978年出版）
Modernist housing in America probably peaked in the early 1970's, and Richard M. Nixon delivered the coup-de-grace in January, 1972 when he killed what little public housing policy the U.S. had. (Roger Sherwood's Modern Housing Prototypes was published in 1978.)

同时，建筑师们开始重新评估整个现代主义进程，而一些住宅项目重新开始后，它们往往变得多一分柔和，少一分傲慢，也少了一些国际化的势态。
Concurrently, architects began to reassess the whole modernist agenda, and when a few housing initiatives resumed they were often based on a gentler, less arrogant, less international set of attitudes.

现在这些问题还是悬而未决的。世界已经不再像二战前呈现一副井井有序的模样，不过现代主义住宅也不都是失败之作。今天的住宅设计已不再是建筑思想的聚焦点，尽管此时它最需要建筑师的关注。白领的迁居在城区腾出了空间，而越来越多的无家可归者频繁出现在我们支离破碎的城区中。眼下，没有政策、没有规划、没有思想、也没有人关心都市生活的方式和质量。国家决策者对此置之不理（除了防范犯罪），因为他们的赞助人来自郊区。建筑设计院一般都不会考虑这方面的问题，因为他们对建筑的“艺术”功能远比建筑在更广泛意义上的城市社会化进程中的功能更有兴趣。最后，尽管现代建筑被誉为失败，但当代建筑师确实旨在提出那些过去被注定不值一提的问题。我们是可以，还是应该（为所有人）建造一个新型的城市，是一个见仁见智的问题。
At the moment the issues are not at all clear. The world is not as tidy a place as it appeared to be before the second world war, but not all modernist housing was a failure either. Today housing is less central to architectural thought at a time when it may be needed most. The urban void caused by white flight makes increasing numbers of homeless increasingly more visible in our fractured inner cities, and it appears that there is no policy, no plan, no thought, and no concern for the form and quality of urban life today. National politicians won't deal with it (except crime prevention) because their financial constituencies are sub-urban. Architecture schools generally don't deal with it because they are more interested in the "art" of architecture than architecture as part of a bigger societal agenda. Finally, despite the so-called "failures of modern architecture," modern architects did attempt to address issues that were not deemed "worthy" before. Whether we can, or should, develop new urban housing (for all) is an open question.