双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史87 摩天大厦

 
还是把最后这一点介绍完吧。并不是所有的桥都好看，但是难看的桥可能总比其他难看的建筑物要少；而且只要你认真去找，即使是难看的桥，通常在背后都有一个有趣的故事。在英国的巴恩斯特伯尔有座桥，可算是最难看的桥之一了。它有许多大小不一的拱，拱的大小不是建筑师设计的，而是根据市民所捐钱的多少决定的。 
87 THE SCRAPERS OF THE SKY摩天大厦
 
HOW high is “up”? For a mountain, “up” may be several miles. For an airplane, “up” may be even higher than the highest mountain. For a building, “up” is a little over one thousand feet. Not nearly so high as the mountain top, not nearly as high as the airplane can fly, but the one thousand feet “up” of the building seems to me even more wonderful than mountain heights or airplane flights. 
Very tall buildings, as you know, are called sky-scrapers. They are an American invention and all but a few of them are in the United States. Most American cities have sky-scrapers but the place where they make the finest showing is New York City. New York has almost two hundred sky-scrapers sticking up into the air like the bristles on a monstrous tooth brush. From a distance they are fairy towers, dream buildings, almost unbelievable. And when you have ridden up to the top of one of the very high sky-scrapers; they become even more unbelievable. 
Gothic cathedrals have tall towers and lofty spires, but next to the tall sky-scrapers the Gothic cathedrals would not look high at all. How can men, you wonder, possibly build so far above the ground? But there you are, one hundred and two stories above the ground, and people on the streets below look like moving black specks. You pinch yourself and it hurts, so you must be awake and not dreaming. The building is real, after all. What a long time it must have taken to build it! 
You are wrong. It takes a very short time to build a sky-scraper. The Gothic cathedrals, you remember, took hundreds of years to build. The Empire State Building in New York City took less than one year. And yet it has one hundred and two stories. Magic! 
Here is more magic. A modern sky-scraper is built from auto trucks! It rises in the air according to schedule. Each steel girder, each piece of stone, each section of pipe, rolls into the building on a truck at just the right time. If the wrong piece got there first, it couldn’t be used at once. There would be no place to put it. It would get in the way. Traffic would be blocked on the street. The whole building would have to wait. So the material is taken out of the trucks and hoisted into place at once, instead of being piled up on the ground to wait its turn. 
You can easily see, then, that a very important part of building a sky-scraper has to be done beforehand. The plans of the architect and engineer have to be very carefully made and checked. All the material has to be ordered and made ready for use so that it will arrive at just the right time—neither too soon nor too late. And that is one reason why the whole huge, wonderful structure can be put together so quickly and without even blocking the streets around it. 
A sky-scraper is made differently from the older kinds of buildings. It has a steel framework. Each story is a kind of steel cage, and on the cage are fastened the outside walls. These walls don’t help at all to hold up the building. The steel cages do all the holding up. The walls are like the walls of a tent—to protect the inside from the weather, not to help support the weight. You would be surprised if you found the outside walls of your house were not resting on the ground, but the outside walls of a sky-scraper do not rest on the ground. They hang on the steel cages. Sometimes you can even see a crack between the sidewalk and the walls of a sky-scraper where the walls aren’t even touching the ground! 
Of course no one would want to walk up to the top floor of a skyscraper. It would take too long. If you tried it, you would find you were so tired out when you reached the top that you probably couldn’t walk down again. So sky-scrapers wouldn’t be any good without elevators. A big sky-scraper has many elevators run by electricity. There are locals and expresses, as on a railroad, so that you can reach the top stories quickly without stopping at each floor all the way up. The elevators on the latest sky-scrapers are arranged so that a passenger never has to wait for one for more than a minute. 
The first sky-scrapers were built in the last years of the nineteenth century. These early sky-scrapers were shaped like tall shoe boxes standing on end. After many of these box buildings were built, people found that they cut off the light from the streets below and from buildings next door. And so cities made rules about how sky-scrapers should be built. The rules said that sky-scrapers could no longer be built with a shape like a shoe box. The higher the building rose in the air, the rules said, the narrower it had to he. 
The lower part of a sky-scraper, for instance, might cover an entire city block. But after the building had risen a certain number of stories, the other stories above had to be set back from the edge of the streets so as not to cut off the light. The tower of the building might be built as high as the sky, just so its base didn’t cover more than one quarter of the base of the first floor of the sky-scraper. 
These set-back rules made the new sky-scrapers look quite different from the older ones. The older sky-scrapers looked different, too, because architects had tried to make them in the style of some architecture of the past. Some had Greek columns at the base, although the columns carried no weight and weren’t used for anything except show. Some had huge cornices at the top which were copied from the Renaissance buildings, but were just as useless and false as the columns. The outsides of these sky-scrapers were “fake,” and “fake” architecture can never be very beautiful. 
The new sky-scrapers are not “fake.” They are not made to imitate some style of the past. Some people call them “stripped architecture.” The architects tried to make theirshapes beautiful without sticking old-fashioned decorations on the outside. Color began to be used. Several sky-scrapers have the outside walls made of black brick trimmed at the top of the building with gold. The American Radiator Building in New York is black and gold. So is the Richfield Building in San Francisco. Other sky-scrapers have dark red bricks at the lower stories, with the color growing lighter and lighter toward the upper stories. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building use the bright nickel-color of rustless steel on the outside. 
The hundreds of windows are no longer just holes in the wall. They are used to add to the beauty of the building. In some sky-scrapers the windows look like stripes running from the ground to the top. They seem to carry the eye upward like the lines of a Gothic cathedral. Others have the windows arranged in rows that make stripes across the building instead of up and down. Other sky-scrapers are made like blocks, small blocks on top of larger blocks. 
 
No.87　THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING AT NIGHT, NEW YORK 
（纽约帝国大厦夜景） 
Photograph by Publishers Photo Service 
But I haven’t yet told you what sky-scrapers are used for. You probably know already. Some are used as offices where people work. Some are used as apartments where people live. Certainly people don’t build sky-scrapers for fun. They have to be useful. And as it costs millions of dollars to build a real sky-scraper, the buildings have to make money after they are built. Sky-scrapers make money by having their rooms rented for offices or apartments. In the office sky-scraper, there is often a bank or a store or even a theater on the first floor. Some office buildings have ten thousand people working in them and when all these people start going home between five and six in the afternoon, they jam the sidewalks and fill the streets with traffic. 
Sky-scrapers seem wonderful at a distance, they seem wonderful near at hand, and the more one learns about them the more wonderful they seem. If you’ve never seen a high sky-scraper, it will give you an idea of how very high it is when I tell you that the mail chutes have to be made with parts in them to slow up the letters dropping down from the top, for otherwise the letters would go so fast they would be scorched!