TOWARDS the end of the 15th century a boy traipsing along a Roman hillside stumbled down a crevice and landed in a subterranean gallery. That dark grotto turned out to be the Emperor Nero's first-century villa, or what was left of it. Nero's successors, eager to rubout all traces of the hated ruler, had built over it, and the vast villa had been forgotten.
15
世纪末，一个正沿着罗马的一处山坡艰难前行的男孩掉下了一处地缝，落在一个地下的画室中。后来证实，那个黑暗的洞穴是罗马皇帝尼禄在一世纪盖的一座行宫，或是那座行宫的遗迹。尼禄之后，急于抹除这位遭人恨的统治者所有痕迹继任者，在原来宫殿的基础上加盖了新的建筑。于是，这座巨大的宫殿就被人们忘记了。
Nero's Domus Aurea (“Golden House”) is one of the case studies in Tom Wilkinson's “Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made”. Mr Wilkinson sets out to demonstrate the full complexity of a building. It takes on the personality of the people who built or occupied it, and its public image evolves in line with theirs.
尼禄的“金宫”是汤姆·威尔金森在《砖头瓦块与芸芸众生：世界十大建筑与它们所塑造的人》中的一个研究案例。威尔金森意在通过这些案例，阐述某一具体建筑的复杂性。为此，他把曾经建造或者占有这一建筑的人的性格，以及随着这些人的公共形象而演变的该建筑的公共形象做为研究对象。
To illustrate his point, Mr Wilkinson (who teaches at University College London) uses examples as old as the Tower of Babel and the Great Mosque of Djenné in Timbuktu, and as recent as Oscar Niemeyer's curved footbridge in Rio de Janeiro. He shows how each building has a meaning of its own, and how that meaning can change over time. The Tower of Babel, for example, is viewed today as the embodiment of vanity and arrogance.Yet for the Babylonians it was a handsome monument, topped by a temple, that was meant to be admired for its architecture.
为了阐明他的观点，在伦敦大学执教的威尔金森所选取的例子，古代的有巴别塔和廷巴克图的杰内大清真寺，现代的有奥斯卡·尼迈耶设计的里约弧形天桥。他既展示出某一建筑的具体含义，也勾勒出这一含义的具体变迁过程。比如说，在现代人看来，
巴别塔就是虚荣与傲慢的化身。但是，古巴比伦人眼中，它就是建一座庙宇之上的一尊漂亮的纪念碑，意在因其设计而受到崇拜。
Mr Wilkinson draws contemporary parallels with these historic edifices. The Palazzo Rucellai, completed in 1450 by a Florentine banker who also paid for the façade of the Church of Santa MariaNovella, is identified as an early example of “architecture as advertising”: a building that not only sign posts the owner's wealth, but publicises his business as a hoarding would. More recent examples of this, he writes, are the Rockefeller Centre in New York and Tokyo's Roppongi Hills city-within-a-city, which has a central skyscraper named after its developer, Minoru Mori.
威尔金森认为，当代建筑和这些历史性建筑是一脉相承的。以鲁切拉宫为例，这座落成于
1450
年、由为新圣母大殿出资的同一位佛罗伦萨银行家花钱建造的宫殿，就是“把建筑当作广告”的一个早期例子。“把建筑当作广告”指的是，一幢建筑不仅要成为一个标识牌，标识出所有者的财富；还要是一个大型的广告牌，把所有者的商业广而告之。他在书中所列举的这方面的最新的例子，一个是纽约的洛克菲勒中心，一个是东京的六本木新城——一个拥有一座以其开发者森捻的名字来命名的中央摩天大楼的城中城。
The author is most at ease when discussing Western architecture. He vividly describes the Highland Park Car Factory inDetroit, which was designed by Albert Kahn for Henry Ford, opened in 1910, and was emblematic of a revolutionary new way of life. He recalls how deeply LeCorbusier and his peers admired the Ford factory and its boxy, warehouse look, and how it inspired the flat-roofed Modernist houses that have been built ever since.
作者的游刃有余在探讨西方建筑时发挥到了极点。他对位于由阿尔伯特·卡恩为亨利·福特设计的底特律高地公园汽车厂做了栩栩如生的描绘。这座在
1910
年投入使用的工厂，曾一度是革命性新生活方式的化身。他回顾了勒·柯布西耶和他的同辈对福特汽车工厂以及它那方方正正的仓库式是如何的深怀敬意，以及从那以后就一直在建筑的当代平顶房屋的设计是如何从这些设计中吸取了灵感。
The evocations of Eastern architecture, on the other hand, tend to meander. The Tower of Babel starts a sequence of ideas that leads via the storming of the Bastille, Lawrence of Arabia and the archaeologist-Arabist Gertrude Bell, to Saddam Hussein, the World Trade Centre and the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. To make his book relevant to contemporary readers, Mr Wilkinson frequently uses modern terminology. But in this chapter, his use of expressionssuch as “dodgy dossier” and “Arab spring” in describing historical episodes is somewhat clunky.
