城市天际线 社会病的心电图

The skyline used to belong to God. The spires and domes which punctured the horizons rose upwards in acknowledgment of a higher purpose.

天际线曾经属于上帝。穿透地平线的尖顶和穹顶向上延伸以宣示更为崇高的目的。

Then came the brick chimneys of industry and their plumes of smoke. Then the monuments of civic identity — the Statue of Liberty, Nelson’s Column, the Eiffel Tower as the power shifted to the cities grown wealthy. These were in turn followed by the skyscrapers as the real influence moved to the corporations and banks which built them. The skyline has always revealed who owns the city, where the real power lies and to whom — or what — the citizens look up.

随后是砖砌的工业烟囱以及它们排放的滚滚浓烟。随着影响力转移到变得富裕起来的城市手中，穿透天际线的随后变成了象征城市身份的纪念性建筑——自由女神像、纳尔逊纪念柱以及埃菲尔铁塔。接下来是摩天大楼，因为实际影响力转移到建造摩天大楼的企业和银行手中。天际线总是揭示出谁拥有这座城市，真正的权力在哪里以及居民仰望的是什么人或者什么东西。

That is why the most recent shift in our skylines demands to be noticed. Anyone visiting New York and looking up will see the city’s skyline radically changing. A new typology has emerged — the skinnyscraper — the ultra-slender, uber-extruded tower whose spiritual home is the edge of Central Park.

这就是我们的天际线的最近转变有必要引起注意的原因所在。任何造访纽约并抬头仰望的人都会看到该城市天际线的剧烈变化。新的分类已经出现——“摩天瘦楼”，即超纤瘦的摩天大楼，其精神家园位于中央公园(Central Park)的边缘。

These attenuated fingers casting their anorexic shadows on to the grass are beginning to exert a real impact on Manhattan’s horizon. Rafael Viñoly’s 96-storey 432 Park Avenue kicked the new era off. Shop Architects’ tapering, astonishingly slender 111 W57th is providing the next instalment. The latter will rise to above the height of the Empire State Building. Jean Nouvel’s MoMA tower and Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill’s Nordstrom Tower are to come. Both will dominate Manhattan’s new horizon.

这些向草坪投下瘦长阴影的纤细高楼开始对曼哈顿的地平线产生真实的影响。拉菲尔•维诺里(Rafael Viñoly)设计的位于派克大街(Park Avenue) 432号的96层公寓大楼开启了这个新时代。SHoP建筑事务所(SHoP Architects)设计的位于西57街(W57th) 111号的超纤廋大楼揭开了下一个篇章。后者的高度将超过帝国大厦(Empire State Building)。让•努韦尔(Jean Nouvel)设计的MoMA以及阿德里安史密斯和戈登吉尔建筑事务所(Adrian Smith & Gordon Gill)设计的诺德斯特姆大厦(Nordstrom Tower)即将完工。这两幢大楼都将主宰曼哈顿新的地平线。

What is so striking about this new kind of skyscraper is its use — these are condo towers, often with only a single apartment to each floor and 360 degree views of the city. Perhaps that is why the shock has been so visceral — they appear to represent a de facto privatisation of the skyline.

这种新的摩天大楼如此引人瞩目的原因在于其用途，这些是产权公寓(condo)大楼，通常每层只有一套公寓，可以360度俯瞰整座城市。或许这正是这种冲击如此触动人心的原因所在——这些大楼似乎代表着天际线在事实上被私有化了。

The scale is not quite the same in London but here, too, the skyline is being punctuated by dozens of apartment towers. You could argue that in London, even though the towers are shorter, the effect is yet more pronounced. This is still low-rise city and each tower exerts a powerful impact.

伦敦的情况没有这么严重，但这里的数十幢公寓大楼也是高耸入云。你可以辩称，在伦敦，即便这些公寓楼稍低一些，但其影响更为显著。这是一座仍有些低矮的城市，而每座大楼都有巨大的影响。

The Shard and the Walkie Talkie now poke their way into the city’s most surprising views. The Shard’s developer, Irvine Sellar, recently went back to the drawing board with plans by the same architect, Renzo Piano, for another super-tall tower.

“碎片大厦”(Shard)和“对讲机”(Walkie Talkie)现在正成为这座城市最令人惊奇的景观。开发Shard的欧文•塞勒(Irvine Sellar)最近在修改同一建筑师伦佐•皮亚诺(Renzo Piano)的另一个摩天大楼的相关计划。

Dubbed the “Paddington Pole” this lanky cylinder would have radically changed the west London skyline — and it is a testament to the wealth and power in the west of the city that the plans are being revised when the Shard, in less-well-off Southwark, seemed to glide through.

这座被称为“帕丁顿杆(Paddington Pole)”的细长圆柱形大楼将极大地改变伦敦西部的天际线。位于不那么富裕的南华克区(Southwark)的Shard似乎悄无声息地就建起来了，而Paddington Pole的相关计划因遭到反对正在修改之中，这是对伦敦西部财富和权力的证明。

The furore over the Piano project in Paddington seemed to indicate a turning point in London just as the concern over the shadows being cast over Central Park did in New York. London could face a future of over 200 new towers of 20 storeys or more appearing on its skyline over the next few years, while even New York’s resolutely high-rise profile is being dominated by the new superskinny, super-tall skyscrapers.

围绕皮亚诺的Paddington项目的群情激奋似乎表明伦敦将出现转折点，就像此前人们对纽约摩天大楼遮挡中央公园阳光的担忧表明纽约出现转折点一样。伦敦今后几年可能出现逾200幢20层甚至更高的新大楼，同时，就连纽约已经绝对算是非常高的天际线，也正在被超纤瘦、超高的新摩天大楼主导。

Fifty years ago in London the buildings that were poking their heads above the horizon tended to be either the architecture of the welfare state — social housing towers, government offices or even hospitals. The Brutalist concrete Guys and St Thomas’s Hospital tower was the tallest in south London in the 70s. Now its neighbour the Shard has made it almost invisible.

50年前，在伦敦，地平线上明显高于其他建筑物的往往是福利政府的建筑——社会保障住房、政府办公楼甚至是医院。野兽派建筑风格的盖伊和圣托马斯医院(Guys & St Thomas’s Hospital)在上世纪70年代是伦敦南部最高的建筑物。现在有了邻居Shard，人们几乎都看不到这座大楼了。

There were occasional spectacular office blocks like Centre Point, now itself being converted to residential, and hotels but even the most striking structures — take the Post Office Tower — were public buildings.

偶尔也会有显眼的写字楼和酒店，比如中心点写字楼（Centre Point，现在改为了住宅楼），但以前最引人注目的建筑物也是公共建筑，比如邮电大楼(Post Office Tower)。

In New York the skyline had been dominated by the corporations which fed the economic boom time of the postwar years: Lever House, the Seagram Building, the Pan Am Building, the AT&T Tower. These were works by the greatest architects of the age built to express the city’s economy as the centre of capital.

在纽约，天际线一直由催生了战后经济繁荣期的企业主导：利华大厦(Lever House)、西格拉姆大厦(Seagram Building)、泛美大楼(Pan Am Building)以及美国电话电报公司大厦(AT&T Tower)。这些都是当时最伟大的建筑师的作品，以表明该城市经济作为资本中心的地位。

In both cities on either side of the Atlantic, the skyline could also be read as a graph of social and economic concerns, an ECG illustrating the pulse of the streets below.

在大西洋两岸的这两座城市里，天际线也可解读为显示社会和经济问题的图表，一张显示下面街道脉动的心电图。

Now the pattern has been disrupted. Some of the towers are undeniably powerful buildings, well-designed, often quite elegant but they are also huge. The towers of today express little of the spirit of the cities above which they loom; rather they act as extruded billboards for real estate as an asset class.

现在这种模式已被打破。其中一些大楼无疑功能强大、设计精良、往往相当雅致，但它们也非常大。如今的大楼几乎丝毫不代表所在城市的精神；在某种程度上来说，它们就是房地产这一资产类别直插天际的广告牌。

The resentment against these new buildings — even when they might be fine architecture — is that they too perfectly capture the pricing out of ordinary citizens from the centres of their respective cities. But perhaps worse than that, the sale of the bulk of these hyper-luxurious high-rise condos to foreign investors, buy-to-leavers and absentee landlords expresses the globalisation of property, the effects of which have been much like the globalisation of industry — the export of profits and the loss of benefits for the city.

人们对这些新大楼（即便在它们是漂亮的建筑物的时候）的不满在于，它们太精准地反映出这一事实：高昂的房价将普通人赶出他们所在城市的中心区域。但或许更糟糕的是，这些超豪华的高层产权公寓大部分被卖给外国投资者、炒房客以及常年不在这里居住的业主，这表明了房地产的全球化，它的影响在很大程度上与工业全球化相似——利润被输出，城市的利益受到损害。

New York, at least, with its high property taxes, manages to capture some of the value back for the city but London, fails in even this most basic respect.

纽约出台了高昂的房地产税，至少成功地为自己夺回了一些价值，但伦敦就连这点最基本的也没有做到。

Peter Rees, one-time chief planner for the City of London, called these properties “safe-deposit boxes in the sky”, an eloquent encapsulation of the alienation of this real estate from the real city that lies below it.

曾担任伦敦金融城首席规划官的彼得•李斯(Peter Rees)将这些房地产称为“天空里的保管箱”，精辟地概括了这种房地产与下方真实城市之间的隔阂。

If this new generation of towers is to be integrated into the city, both physically and psychologically to become part of the streets which they cast in shadow, this problem will need to be addressed.

要想让这新一代高楼融入所处城市，无论从物理上还是心理上都成为被它们阴影笼罩的街道的一部分，那么就需要应对这个问题。

If it is not, the consequence will be a new architecturally-imposed class system and a picture of inequality inscribed in the skyline in the most graphic way imaginable.

如果不应对这个问题，后果将是一种新的由建筑造成的阶级体系，以可以想象得到的最生动的手法在天际线上刻画出不平等的画面。

It will leave citizens feeling like tourists in their own cities, gawping up at the homes of the wealthy blacking out the sky where once there was sun.

这将让市民觉得他们是自己城市里的游客，呆呆地仰望高高耸立、遮天蔽日的富人居所。