Making Architectural Judgements

1、Unit4,Text,How should an architect, a client, a citizen, or a government agency or commission judge designs for new buildings? This question is especially pertinent if the new structures are to be erected in historic districts. How does one decide whether the proposed new building will enhance or detract from its surrounding, and whether it promotes the kind of further development that will benefit the historic area? What criteria can be used as a basis for such judgments? Do the answers lie in

2、adhering to some correct architectural ideology derived from a classical, a modernist, or a post-modernist point of view to be handed down by experts? Does the task require studied connoisseurship, group consensus growing out of broad public participation, or some combination of these positions? The need of a more rational approach to these questions is evident from the nature of the discussion that has surrounded recent controversial building, in which reasonable differences of opinion have oft

3、en devolved into vituperative confrontations. The differences among opposing groups often hinge on passionately held beliefs about aesthetics, politics, or such vague nations as the demands of the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. The focus on subjective questions of taste, ideology, and personality tends to discourage constructive debate and to ignore more complex and pertinent questions of how to protect the public interest.,Text,The depth of this problem may be seen by reviewing the weak an

4、d conflicting statements of problems that are presented within transcripts of hearing before boards and commissions with purview over architectural projects, and by reading their subsequent reports1. Anyone who has attended juries evaluating students work at schools of architecture will be familiar with the subjective criteria that often pass for considered, objective judgments. Because decision-making bodies cannot evade their responsibilities, this haphazard, emotion-laden way of defining arch

5、itectural standards has created the incoherently planned cityscape, the suburban sprawl, and the suburbanized countryside we see around us2. This contemporary dilemma should be considered in its proper historical context. The generations of architects since 1945 are the first in the history of architecture who have not been able to fulfill two expectations that society has taken for granted since the ancient Greeks created cities: that architects are able to create both the competently designed

6、background architecture that forms the bulk of building in a town or city, as well as noble foreground buildings, the monumental architecture of civic and religious structures that embodies a societys highest aspirations.,Text,It was in this way that architects of the past arranged their designs in city plans so as to make the new as beautiful, or better than, what was there before. Remarkable examples of this abound: Jacopo Sansovinos inspired recreation of the Piazza di San Macro and the Piazz

7、etta, accomplished by transforming the Campanile into a free-standing tower and fulcrum to connect Piazza with the Piazzetta, and the brilliant design of the new Library3; JF Blondel s classical faade of the medieval Metz Cathedral, sadly destroyed, and new adjacent buildings; Mnesicles Propylaea at the Acropolis; and Wrens buildings at Oxford and Cambridge. To revitalize contemporary practice to meet the standards of the past is an urgent responsibility. Architecture is a liberal art that is ta

8、ught at our great universities, and is a discipline that should be amenable to rational discourse. The aim here is not to decide on the ultimate artistic worth of a proposed building, for this requires the kind of considered assessment that, ultimately, The process offers a set of criteria which can help to make distinctions between the architectural characteristics of a proposed building and to relate them to those of the buildings which exist around its site.,Text,Once articulated, these disti

9、nctions provide a common basis for concerned citizens, critics, decision-making bodies and architects to debate the drawbacks and virtues of the design and to prepare a solid foundation for a decision to accept or to improve or otherwise modify the design or programme. Architecture is a public art. It is the building block of the city, a compound work, realized over centuries. Cities are always changing, growing and being altered, being destroyed and being rebuilt, all in response to social and

10、political change, to the demands of commerce and industry, and to the rhythms of technological innovation. Villages and rural areas are subject to the same pressures. Each time a new building is proposed it must be studied, not in isolation, but evaluated as a part of the increasingly complex whole that forms all regions.,New Words and Expressions,ideology n.思想（体系），思想意识；意识形态； connoisseurship n.鉴赏家（或鉴定家、行家）身份；鉴赏（或鉴定）能力 devolve vt. “as beautiful, or better than, what was there before” 在beautiful后省

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