双语+MP3|美国学生艺术史63 完美的建筑

 
说起来可能有点令人难以置信。现在的城市在多年之后也会像古代亚述或巴比伦那样，化作一堆堆长满野草的土丘。来来往往，熙熙攘攘的人群也终将消失不见。当年生活在亚述的人也可能早就料到了这一点。 
63 THE PERFECT BUILDING完美的建筑
 
IF YOU make a mistake in your arithmetic or composition, you can correct it or tear it up and do it over. If a picture or a statue is ugly, it can be put out of sight, hidden, or destroyed. But if a building is ugly, there it stands for every one to see. Its ugliness, its mistakes cannot be covered up until it falls down or is torn down. An architect once committed suicide just as the great temple he had planned was finished. He left a note saying that he had made five mistakes in the building and as they could not be corrected and could not be covered up, there they were for every one to see forever. He could not stand the disgrace. 
Most buildings that are erected have many mistakes, many things that are ugly about them, though few people, few passers-by may notice anything wrong. 
But there was one building that was erected over two thousand years ago that has no mistakes. It is one of the few perfect buildings in the world. It was built by men, but built for a woman, in honor of a Greek goddess, the Goddess of Wisdom, whose name was Athene Parthenos. And so the building was called after her last name, the Parthenon. It is on a high hill in the city of Athens, in Greece, and though it has been partly destroyed, people go from all over the world to see what a perfect building looks like. 
The Egyptian temples had flat roofs because there was little or no rain in Egypt and so a sloping roof to shed the rain was not necessary. The Greek temples had to have slanting roofs, for Greece had rain. So the Parthenon had a sloping roof. 
The Egyptians built their temples with the columns on the inside. The Greeks turned the Egyptian temple inside out and put the columns on the outside. The Greek temple was not to hold people, but only the statue of the goddess. People didn’t go inside to worship as they do in our churches. They stood on the outside. The columns the Greeks used were not like those the Egyptians used. They were simpler, but much more beautiful. 
Greek temples had three kinds of columns, but the kind used in the Parthenon was the Man’s Style column. It is called Doric after a very old Greek tribe. Not only the column but the style of building that always went with this particular column was strong, simple, plain. That’s why it is called the Man’s Style. There were many Doric buildings in Greece, but the Parthenon was the most beautiful of all. 
 
No.63-1　THE PARTHENON, ATHENS（雅典帕台农神庙） 
A Doric building is built on a terraced or stepped platform and is not made of mud bricks plated with alabaster or tile as the Two River people built their temples, but of solid stone, usually marble. There was no cheating in Greek building. It was really what it seemed to he. 
Styles in ladies’ hats and clothes change often, as you know, but the Doric style of building has lasted over two thousand years and we are still using it to-day. I’ll try to describe it so you can tell it when you see it. 
The Doric column has no base, but rests directly on the platform It tapers slightly as a tree trunk does. Its sides are not perfectly straight. They may look so, but as a matter of fact, they bulge slightly. This bulge is called entasis and a column was given entasis because one that had straight sides, one without entasis, looked as if it were thinner in the middle. 
Some architects of the present time, noticing this ever so slight bulge in the Doric column, have thought they would improve on it by making the bulge greater. Some people, when the doctor says take one pill, take two, reasoning that if one pill is good for you, two will be better. But the Greek entasis was just exactly enough and more entasis makes a column look fat and ugly like a man who is fat around the middle. 
The sides of the Doric column were then fluted—that is cut with grooves so as to make slender, lengthwise shadows from top to bottom of the column and thus take away from the plainness that a perfectly smooth colunm would have. Most columns nowadays have no fluting. You can imagine how difficult it is to cut such channels in marble without making a single slip. One single slip would ruin the column and it couldn’t be repaired. 
The top of the column is called the capital because capital means head. The capital was made of a piece shaped like a saucer, above which was a thin square block. You’ll have to look at the picture to understand the rest. 
There is probably some Doric building where you live, for as I have said we are still using this style to-day. It may be a bank or a library, a court-house or some other building. Examine it and see if it has all these things that a perfect Doric building has and only these things. 
Are the columns of stone or only of wood? 
Are they fluted or only plain? 
Has it the proper capital and other parts as in the true Doric style? 
Men have tried ever since the time the Parthenon was built to improve on the Doric temple, but it seems impossible to do so. Every change they make from the original is less beautiful. 
One of my earliest recollections is a picture of the Parthenon that hung on the wall of my school room. I had seen it day after day for months. One day I asked my teacher what the picture was. 
“It’s a picture of the most beautiful building in the world,” she replied. 
“What! That old wreck?” I exclaimed. “I don’t see anything beautiful about it.” 
“You wouldn’t,” she answered. 
That expression “You wouldn’t” rankled. I wanted to argue why it wasn’t beautiful, but she wouldn’t argue. 
“Wait until you grow up,” she said. 
I hated to be treated as a child who couldn’t understand what was beautiful and what wasn’t, so I set about trying to find out why the Parthenon was not beautiful. But the more arguments I tried to find, the less I found. 
And then one day, twenty-five years later, when I first looked upward at that great Doric temple itself, standing against the blue sky, a traveler at my side remarked, “I don’t see anything beautiful about that broken down old ruin.” 
 
No.63-2 DORIC 
COLUMN 
（陶立克柱式） 
And at that, I turned and just kept myself from saying, “You wouldn’t.” 
Even a young child can tell whether a person is beautiful or ugly, but even old people can’t tell whether a building is beautiful or ugly, otherwise we shouldn’t have so many ugly buildings. Any one can tell when a person is too tall or too fat, when his ears are too big or his nose too small, whether his proportions, as we call them, are right or wrong, but it takes a good eye to tell when a building’s proportions are right or wrong. Any one can tell that a wart or crossed eyes or a double chin or bow legs are not beautiful. 
Now, some buildings have just as ugly things as warts, double chins, or bow legs, but often even old people can’t see them. But the Greeks had what we call “a good eye,” not only for people’s looks, but for a building’s looks. 
Some people can’t tell when a picture is hanging straight on the wall. They may even measure the distance and declare it straight, but a person with a “good eye” can detect what the ruler may not show— that it is tipped the smallest bit, just a hair’s breadth perhaps. 
There are two important tools that every builder nowadays uses— a plumb bob and a level. A plumb bob tells whether a wall or a column or anything else supposed to be straight up and down is really straight up and down or vertical, as it is called. A level, which has a little bubble in a glass on its edge, tells whether a floor or a sill or anything else supposed to be level is really level or horizontal, as it is called. You can’t fool a plumb bob or a level. 
But the Greeks said you couldn’t believe the plumb bob or the level, for columns that are really vertical seem to lean out and floors that are really horizontal seem to sag in the middle. That’s because our eyes make them seem so, but as it is our eyes that have to see buildings, the Greek builders of the Parthenon built it as they wanted the eyes to see it, and so, though all lines may seem to be vertical, horizontal, level, or straight, there is really not a vertical line or a horizontal line or a perfectly straight line in the Parthenon. That’s one of the things that makes the Parthenon so extraordinary! 
The columns were not made of single blocks of stone, but of drum-shaped pieces which, however, were cut with such exactitude that they fitted perfectly and no crack showed. It is even said the pieces have grown together like a broken bone that is well set!