2010年7月22日 星期四

The balance between form and function in the office

不知道多少人知道上海日商MORI大樓的 "太陽"設計被中國政治大修理...

写字楼:让功能决定外形
The balance between form and function in the office




The trade-offs between having a prestigious building that makes a mark on the skyline but which is also a good place to work in are notorious. A spectacular landmark, such as London's 30 St Mary Axe, the Lord Foster-designed building known as the “Gherkin”, can literally put a business on the map and broadcast its owner's ambitions to the world. But monuments to corporate pride also create a host of challenges for their occupants.

建造一栋能够成为城市风景线标记的知名建筑,同时又是一个好的办公场所,这其中的取舍 闻名天下。一栋壮观的标志性建筑——如福斯特爵士(Lord Foster)设计的伦敦圣玛丽斧街30号(30 St Mary Axe),俗称“小黄瓜(Gherkin)”——真的能让一家企业出名,让全世界了解其主人的雄心。但这些“企业骄傲”丰碑,也会给它们的入驻者带来一系 列挑战。

“Curved funky structures use space inefficiently and can be expensive to fit out,” says Hugh Mulcahey, a director at Cyril Sweett, the property consultants. Tall, thin towers often wreak havoc with team working by splitting departments across several floors. And, while a soaring column may look good from the outside, hermetically sealed interiors can leave occupants feeling jaded.

“时髦的曲线形建筑空间利用效率低下,装饰也可能非常昂贵,”房地产咨询公司 Cyril Sweett负责人休•马尔卡希(Hugh Mulcahey)表示。又高又薄的大厦往往会对团队合作造成严重破坏,因为公司的各个部门会被迫分布于好几个楼层上。此外,尽管耸入云霄的大楼从外面看 上去可能很棒,但密不透气的室内环境可能会让居住者感到疲惫。

Linda Felmingham, director of administration at Hunton & Williams, a US law firm that rents space in the “Gherkin”, says working in “a lovely building that everyone knows about” definitely has the wow factor. “If I get in a cab I don't give the address, I just say ‘The Gherkin',” she says.

美国何威律师事务所(Hunton & Williams)在“小黄瓜”内租了办公场所。该公司行政主管琳达•费明厄姆(Linda Felmingham)表示,在“一栋所有人都知道的可爱建筑”内工作,无疑会让人羡慕。“如果我上了一辆出租车,我不用说地址,而只需要说‘小黄瓜 ',”她说道。

On the downside, she highlights security, which has to be watertight to guard against the possibility of terrorist attack. “All our visitors have to go through airport-style scanners.”

至于不利的方面,她着重强调了安全——安保措施必须非常严密,以防范可能的恐怖袭击。 “我们所有的访客都必须经过机场式扫描设备。”

Bold attempts have been made to resolve the tension between form and function in workplace architecture, and not all have been successful. In the early 1990s, the architect Ralph Erskine designed the Ark, a vast ship-like building next to the Hammersmith flyover in west London, as the perfect space for open-plan working. But for years it stood empty.

解决办公建筑形状与实用性矛盾的大胆尝试有很多,但并非所有尝试都取得了成功。上世纪 90年代初期,建筑师拉尔夫•厄斯金(Ralph Erskine)设计了伦敦船楼(Ark,靠近伦敦西部汉莫史密斯(Hammersmith)高架道路的一栋像巨型船只的建筑),作为开敞式办公的完美空 间。但这座大楼在很多年里一直无人入驻。

The basic problem, says Stuart McLarty a partner at De Novo-Architecture, which radically restructured the inside of the building in 2006, was that the hollow interior mirrored the highly bespoke specification of its intended owner-occupier and could not be partitioned. When that company quit the UK before moving in, the property struggled to attract tenants.

De Novo-Architecture合伙人斯图亚特•麦克拉蒂(Stuart McLarty)表示,这座船楼的根本问题是,空空的内部完全按照其预期业主/居住者的严格要求定制,无法进行分隔,而当那家公司尚未入驻就撤出英国时, 这栋大楼就难以吸引到其他租客。De Novo-Architecture公司于2006年对这栋大楼内部进行了彻底重建。

Another drawback was the soaring interior walkways, which terrified vertigo sufferers. “We went to one event [before the redevelopment solved the problem] where a caterer was too scared to cross an internal bridge to get to the reception,” recalls Mr McLarty.

另一个缺点是高高的内部走道,这让恐高症患者非常害怕。“(在重建解决该问题前),我 们去参加一个活动,一位宴席承办者怕得不敢跨过内部的一座天桥到达招待会现场,”麦克拉蒂回忆说。

Germany's tallest building, Commerzbank Tower, home to Commerzbank's Frankfurt headquarters and also designed by Lord Foster, has done a better job of marrying statement architecture and employee comfort. After conducting research among staff, the bank built the tower around garden atria that let in natural light.

德国的最高建筑——德国商业银行大厦(Commerzbank Tower)在将建筑的宏伟外观与雇员舒适度结合方面做得比较好。这座位于法兰克福的大厦是德国商业银行总部所在地,其设计师也是福斯特爵士。在雇员中进 行调查后,该银行围绕着一座花园中庭建造了该大厦,以便接受自然光照。

Creating a double-layer facade solved the problem of how to draw away wind from the upper stories, allowing occupants at the top of the building to open and close windows instead of relying on air-conditioning. “We looked at how we could make working more attractive,” says Arno Walter, the bank's head of organisation.

双层幕墙解决了高层受风问题,使高层居住者也可以开闭窗口,而不是依赖空调。“我们着 眼于如何能让工作变得更有吸引力,”该银行组织部主管阿诺·沃尔特(Arno Walter)表示。

In the financial centre of Shanghai, a futuristic 632m skyscraper is under construction that its backers also hope will resolve some of the tensions between function and design. The Shanghai Tower, scheduled for completion in 2014, will be the third of three super-tall towers that rise from the city's financial centre in the Pudong district.

在上海的金融中心,一座高632米的未来风格摩天大楼正在建设中,它的开发者也希望解 决外形设计与功能的一些矛盾。定于2014年完工的上海中心大厦(Shanghai Tower),将成为该市浦东金融区崛起的第三座超高层大厦。

According to Christopher Chan, design director with Gensler, the tower's architects, The Shanghai Tower Construction & Development Company, the building's developer, wanted a building that made working in a tall tower more comfortable. “We started by asking how do we want the building to work, and that determined the form,” Mr Chan says.

据这座大厦的设计公司——Gensler设计总监Christopher Chan表示,该大厦开发商上海中心大厦建设发展有限公司,希望建造一座让工作变得更舒服的大厦。“我们从询问客户希望这座大厦如何运行着手,这决定了大 厦的形式,”Chan表示。

As China's tallest building, it will certainly be a landmark. But practicalities rather than aesthetics have decided its shape. To avoid building congestion, the tower is being stacked like a wedding cake in nine self-contained cylindrical tiers, each with access to its own services. These include atrium sky-gardens, cafés, restaurants and shops designed to improve access to natural light and encourage socialising.

作为中国的最高建筑,它无疑会成为一个新地标。但决定其形状的不是美学,而是实用性。 为了避免建筑拥挤状况发生,这座大厦被设计成了结婚蛋糕的形状,由九个自成一体的圆筒形层段重叠而成,每一层段都有自己的服务,包括空中花园中庭、咖啡 馆、餐厅、商店,从设计上增加自然光照,鼓励社交。

The building's twisting, tapering exterior was chosen to minimise the size of supporting columns, increase useable space for work areas and reduce wind loads. Lower wind loads should make life inside the tower more comfortable.

之所以选择扭曲且愈变愈细的外部形状,主要是为了将支柱的尺寸降到最小、扩大办公区域 的可用空间、降低风载。较低的风载会使大厦内部的生活变得更加舒适。

“If you go into restaurants of super-tall towers, you can often feel them sway,” says Callum MacBean, managing director of Gensler's Shanghai office. “After a large lunch the sensation can be quite off-putting.”

“如果你走进超高层大厦的餐厅,你常常会感到它们在摇晃,”Gensler上海办公室 董事总经理卡勒姆•麦克宾(Callum MacBean)表示。“饱餐之后,这种感觉会让人很不舒服。”

Of course, nesting inside an existing trophy building is generally more affordable than commissioning a monument from scratch. The downside, however, is that the floor-plates may not fit your way of working or even your choice of furniture. So how can businesses make the best of an inherited layout?

当然,在一栋现有的纪念性建筑中落户,通常比从零开始建造成本要低。不过,缺点是,地 板可能不适合你的工作方式,甚至不适合你的家具选择。那么,企业该如何最有效地利用原有的建筑物呢?

One way to get the best out of a building that has not been designed with the needs of your workforce in mind is to use space creatively. Jeremy Myerson, director of the Royal College of Art's Helen Hamlyn Centre and co-author of New Demographics, New Workspace, says “rectilinear glass boxes” found in identikit offices are easy to fill with rows of desks but the awkward pockets in unusually shaped, stylish buildings can provide the quiet nooks in which knowledge workers flourish, provided they are used imaginatively. “As well as areas for collaboration, offices need quiet zones for concentrated work and places for rest and recuperation,” he adds.

对于一栋在设计时未曾考虑你的员工队伍需求的大厦,最有效的利用方式之一就是创造性地 使用空间。杰里米•迈尔森(Jeremy Myerson)是英国皇家艺术学院海伦•哈姆林中心(Royal College of Art's Helen Hamlyn Centre)的主任,同时也是《新人口结构、新办公区域》(New Demographics, New Workspace)的作者之一。他表示,“直线形玻璃盒”式的普通办公室很容易放置一排排的办公桌,但造型独特、格调高雅办公楼中不便利用的角落,若得 到创造性的利用,则可以提供安静的空间,让知识型工人出色发挥。“除了合作区域,办公室还需要供专心工作使用的安静区域,以及休整区域,”他补充表示。

How space is divided up also speaks volumes to employees about how their bosses value them. This can have a huge impact on morale. Working in a nondescript dark interior does not have the feelgood factor of occupying a lofty corner office with a bird's-eye view.

空间如何分割,也可以告诉雇员:老板对他们有多么看重。这对士气可能会产生巨大影响。 在一间没有任何特色的阴暗安公室内工作,不会有占据高层角落办公室、可临窗观景的良好感觉。

Rather than saving the plum spots for executives, Sevil Peach, director of Sevil Peach Architecture and Design, recommends placing communal areas around the edges of buildings so everyone gets a “democratic share” of natural light and panoramic vistas.

Sevil Peach Architecture and Design主管塞维尔·皮奇(Sevil Peach)建议,与其将令人向往的地方留给高管,倒不如围绕大厦边缘建造公共区域,以便让每个人都可以“民主地共享”自然光照与全景式视野。

However, it is better not to position desks too close to windows or force employees to walk through narrow glass-sided corridors, cautions Jack Pringle, co-founder of interior architects Pringle Brandon. “People might like the views, but many would rather stand a metre or two back,” he says.

不过,室内设计公司Pringle Brandon 联合创办人杰克• 普林格尔(Jack Pringle)警告称,最好不要将桌子放置得离窗户太近,或迫使雇员走狭窄的玻璃墙走廊。“人们或许喜欢景色,但许多人宁愿往后退一两米,”他表示。

Putting in connecting stairways overlooking work areas can build a sense of community among departments stacked on top of each other, overcoming the problem of tall towers that force teams to split up.

修建俯瞰工作区的连接楼梯,可以在分布于不同楼层的部门间建立团队感,克服摩天大楼迫 使团队分开的问题。

Another way to pull people together is to create a communal floor with cafés and soft seating. “Otherwise people just e-mail each other,” says Ms Peach.

另一个将人们聚拢在一起的方法,是建一个带有咖啡屋与软沙发的公共区域层。“否则,人 们只会互相发邮件联系,”皮奇表示。

A building that makes a splash on the skyline may be high-maintenance, but for some companies, at least, it seems the investment can pay off.

一栋在城市风景线中引人注目的建筑,可能需要很高的维护费,但至少对于某些公司而言, 这笔投资似乎是值得的。


译者/何黎

2010年7月16日 星期五

Matisse at MoMA: Carving With Color

1993年參觀過 MoMA:Matisse大展
住老康夫婦家




Art Review

Matisse at MoMA: Carving With Color

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“Interior With Goldfish,” left, is paired with “Goldfish and Palette” in the Museum of Modern Art’s Matisse show, which offers a close reading of four of the most arduous years of his career.


The Museum of Modern Art’s extraordinary “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917” is not your garden-variety Matisse exhibition. It contains few signs of the artist who said a painting should be the equivalent of a soothing armchair. By the end of this show you may wonder if that Matisse ever really existed, despite his much-quoted, overinterpreted words to that effect.

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Matisse’s 1915 “Still Life After Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘La Desserte,’” right, is a rendition of an academic copy of de Heem’s painting that he made in 1893.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

“Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg,” a study in lines and textures.

Instead “Matisse: Radical Invention” offers a view of a driven, even tormented Matisse, who second-guessed himself, rethought and reworked his images and often left them looking bracingly fresh and conditional, even unfinished. We see an artist increasingly interested in making clear not just his painting process, but also a kind of emotional concentration that, while hardly Expressionist, did not exactly exemplify the Olympian detachment habitually attributed to him.

With more than 100 paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, the Modern’s show, which opens Sunday, offers a close reading of four of the most arduous years of Matisse’s long career, as well as the six or so preceding them. It was organized by John Elderfield, a veteran of several major Matisse exhibitions and the Modern’s chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, and Stephanie D’Alessandro, curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The ensemble highlights Matisse’s inspired shuffling of mediums, his even-handed willingness to take from one to stir up another. In several paintings boldly drawn black lines disrupt planes of color, like armatures that refuse to stay put.

Matisse’s four great “Back” reliefs that usually haunt the Modern’s garden are on hand, their increasingly distilled forms looking in this context more like maquettes for paintings than cast bronzes. They confirm why Matisse the painter was called a carver of color and space.

Works large and small, major and minor all make their points sooner or later. The great “Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg” — whose masklike face, hemmed-in torso and superannuating arcs of radiance are more scratched than painted — may sharpen your appreciation of the insistent lines and textures in several drawings and a lithograph of female nudes in the show’s opening gallery. Matisse could carve with the brush, but at times he also used it like a pencil.

The thorn in Matisse’s side for most of the years encompassed by this show was Picasso’s ferocious “Demoiselles d’Avignon” of 1907 and Cubism, its more refined aftermath. Until the “Demoiselles,” conveniently located downstairs at MoMA, Matisse had been riding high. Inspired by African art — to which he introduced Picasso — he almost single-handedly revived European sculpture with a new bluntness and distortion of form. As first among the Fauves — or Wild Beasts — he, along with Georges Braque and André Derain, revolutionized painting with a new emphasis on stark color: color for color’s sake. His bright, raw contributions to the autumn salons of 1905 and ’06 had scandalized the public, to his satisfaction.

But “Demoiselles” changed things. Braque and Derain shortly became, in the words of Gertrude Stein, “Picassoites and were definitely not Matisseites.” Stein also changed sides, which wounded Matisse.

By 1910 Matisse had withdrawn from the hurly-burly of the Paris art world. He rented a house in the suburbs, built a studio in its garden and refueled with travel. He saw a mind-boggling show of Islamic art in Munich and Russian icons in Moscow. In Spain he encountered Moorish architecture and the works of Velázquez, El Greco and Goya. During long sojourns in Morocco in 1912 and early 1913, he reaffirmed his faith in the marriage of light and color. But by January 1914 he was back in Paris. He an his wife moved into an apartment at 19 Quai Saint-Michel. It was one floor below the studio in which he had worked from 1894 to 1907, with the same view of the Seine and Notre Dame.

In the next years Matisse pushed his art to even greater extremes of scale, stand-alone color, formal power, surface roughness and emotional undertow. He confronted Cubism by becoming more aggressively and transparently himself.

Spaciously arrayed in five large galleries, the MoMA show includes a bumper crop of Matisse’s most important canvases and one by Cézanne: the small, powerful “Three Bathers” of 1879-82. Matisse purchased the work from Ambroise Vollard in 1899, though he could ill afford it, and cherished it as a talisman until giving it to the Musée du Petit Palais in the 1930s.

Hanging near the show’s entrance, “Bathers” signals Matisse’s early understanding of Cézanne’s importance — an awareness that only became widespread with Cézanne’s 1906 memorial retrospective. It also suggests that Matisse shared more than a little of Cézanne’s well-known doubt while also indicating one of the show’s larger themes: Matisse’s link to the grand French tradition of painting nudes in landscapes.

This first gallery includes Matisse’s snarling “Blue Nude” of 1907 — which sent Picasso back to the studio to toughen up “Demoiselles” — and the eternally strange “Bathers With a Turtle” (1907-08), dominated by a proto-Brice Marden background and an alpha female who is either devouring her hands or about to regurgitate food for the turtle. The show concludes with Chicago’s monumental “Bathers by a River,” which Matisse grappled with off and on for most of the period covered by this exhibition. He began it in 1909-10 and returned to it in 1913 before finally completing it in 1917. With its immense dolmen-tree-trunk figures in shades of gray, blue and pink, it remains one of the most difficult, least ingratiating of modernist masterpieces.

The show is full of marvelous pairings and clusters of paintings executed close to the same time in which Matisse approaches and sometimes takes a timeout from “radical invention.” A particularly stunning gallery contains seven paintings made in the first six months after returning to Quai Saint-Michel, including the Landsberg portrait. The greatness of the Modern’s “Goldfish and Palette” — its scale, startling pentimenti and flirtation with abstraction — has never been clearer than when seen next to “Interior With Goldfish,” a more conventional, if still glorious version of the same view. The group culminates in the divine economies of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Branch of Lilacs,” a bouquet of soft thin smudges of color and bare canvas, and the Modern’s “View of Notre Dame,” an intimation of sky and stone that is still unsettlingly cursory after all these years.

Everything looks fresh. Matisse’s nearly Baroque 1915 rendition of his 1893 academic copy of Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s “Desserte” is a MoMA staple that has always seemed mercilessly clogged to me. Here it reads as a blithe lexicon of the paint treatments that can be found throughout the show.

Matisse’s small monotype portraits from World War I stand out as “carved” with a few clean, deft needle-fine lines. And they stand up to their neighbors, a series of imposing charcoal and pencil portraits of women in which clouds of erasures are as crucial to the sense of form and personality as the drawn lines. In the show’s second-to-last gallery the melons, turbans and minarets of “The Moroccans” — a painting almost as truculent as “Bathers by a River” — are foreshadowed by monotypes and then paintings of apples and other fruit on tables.

“Demoiselles” was the Big Bang that helped Matisse become more fully himself, but Cubism barely grazed him. Cézanne’s “petites sensations” inspired Picasso and Braque to shatter Renaissance space into so many little pieces as to be atomized. Fittingly William S. Rubin, who ruled the Modern’s department of painting and sculpture for nearly two decades could characterize Analytic Cubism — which he adored — as the last stage of old master painting.

Matisse was not so interested in shattering, or in small pieces. He focused on wholeness, simplicity and monumentality, in planes that bent and angled in ways that suggest fragments of Cubism writ large. He built on Cézanne as surely as the Cubists did, but balanced that influence with an abiding admiration for the flat colors of Giotto’s frescoes, landmarks of the early Renaissance, which he saw in Padua during a trip to Italy in 1907. Giotto showed Matisse how to make color live big, enabling him to turn Cézanne’s petites sensations into something grand.

It is not every museum exhibition that begins with blown-up reproductions of small, sometimes minute details of 15 of the paintings displayed inside. This amazing show keeps your eyes on their toes. Attention paid is profusely and profoundly rewarded.

2010年7月11日 星期日

德国阿普博物馆举行"艺术品基座"展

base

文化人生 | 2010.07.11

德国阿普博物馆举行"艺术品基座"展

"基座"在艺术领域始终扮演着重要的角色。但今天它已不再像从前那样,主要作为放置大人物的塑像之用,它更多地是成为艺术作品中游戏或讽刺的元素。

"阿普博物馆"位于波恩以南数公里的地方。博物馆的艺术总监 说,有基座的地方离艺术必定不远,即使今天的基座不再用大理石制作,也不再是标 榜将相、侯爵荣耀的道具。相反,时代潮流更倾向于将纪念雕像从基座上推翻而不是树立。现代人对"伟大的人物"敬而远之。但艺术家们仍需要这种展示作品的底 座。来自瑞士的艺术家帕维尔.史密特(Pawel Schmidt)说:"其实底座从一开始就属于创作的一部分,我需要用它来展示我的作品。它就像素描的纸张,画油的画布一样,属于一种展示作品的载体。"

阿尔波图.贾科梅蒂(Alberto Giacometti)和康斯坦丁.布兰库西(Constantin Brancusi)改变了底座的功能,把它或放大、或缩小、或倒装地融入艺术作品中。从前令人肃然起敬的基座,如今成为艺术作品中讽刺、揶揄的素材,有时 被传奇化了,但也被庸俗化了。

阿普博物馆馆长奥利维埃.科恩霍夫(Oliver Kornhoff)表示,颠覆基座原始用途的第一人,是19世纪末叶的法国著名雕塑家罗丹(Auguste Rodin)。他解释道:罗丹的作品'夏娃'直接站在地上,首展是在巴黎的一个敞开的大厅里,地上没有固定的木板或石板,只有土地。他就把雕像的底座埋在 土里,夏娃等于直接站在地上,就像你我这样。这在当时是一种革命。"

美丽的夏娃雕像目前正在阿普博物馆展出。而帕维尔.史密特的雕塑作 品则大异其趣:他将庸俗和传奇揉在一起,从而产生了一种荒诞。史密特介绍说:

"比如博物馆展出的这个花园小矮人儿,头上长出了爱神维纳 斯。它们都是包豪斯花园中心为人们美化自家花园所提供的装饰用促销产品,一组7件,可装饰 7个花盆。"

其他艺术家则利用木制的邮寄包装 纸盒、陶土、木桶、铁管或重叠起来的桌子为素材,或将基座用布料包裹成一件大衣,以及利用简单美观的木质、抛光大理 石,或雪花石膏制作底座。

这 一切显示出,艺术家和艺术作品不再高高在上地睥睨观众,也就是说,艺术更民主化了。观众与艺术平起平坐无分高下,观众有时还可以参与创作。博物馆 长科恩霍夫表示:"我们展出的作品当中,有些真的可以让观众亲自参与其中,体验创作的感觉,体验自己突然成了高人一等的纪念雕像的感觉,因为站在底下的观 众会好奇地问说,那个人为什么站在基座上?这是一种新的创意,一种在19世纪无法想象的情景。"

即使在21世纪的今天,这种情况也绝非 理所当然,敢站上基座的人寥寥无几。或许因为高处不胜寒?