Spring对《Theory and Design in the First Machine Age》的笔记(1)

第88页 Adolf Loos and the problem of ornament

对原文的节选，对选文的部分意译。
…As an architect he appears as one of the first to build in a manner that really valued simplicity of form as a virtue in itself, yet usually spoiled that simplicity by usages that willfully departed from it, or materials that concealed it. As a write he was prolific and usually well-informed, yet much of his influence depends upon one, or possibly two, of his most opinionated essays. As a person he was turbulent, combative, contradictory and capable of turning personal quarrels into public crusades, yet he was admired and courted, and people are still proud to claim his acquaintance, twenty or more years after his death.
作为一名建筑师……作为一名作者……作为一个人的路斯（私以为这几句写的蛮好，大抵许多“个人意志”强硬的人都会如此吧）……
The subject of this essay – the status of architectural decoration – was not a new one, and in the early years of the century was a very live issue. But Loos’s attitude towards the subject goes far beyond that of any of his contemporaries, and directly contradicts that of some of the most influential bodies of opinion, notably the Werkbund... 
路斯对于建筑装饰的态度，远远走在与他的时代同僚之前，并且直接与当时一些最具影响力的观点相抵触，最显著的是德意志制造联盟。

……
（讲述路斯的文章在德国、在法国、在奥地利发表的过程等……）
But what is most remarkable, in view of later developments, is to find within the line of descent from English Free architecture and the Deutscher Werkbund, no sense of impropriety in the ornamentation of machinery, engineering structures and machine products. The development of such a sense is a tribute to the revolution in taste effected by Loos himself and the Abstract aesthetics of the war years…

…It is easy to suppose that Muthesius’s demands for the elimination of the nebensächlich refers to ornament specifically, but an examination of Werkbund products suggests that it only refers to ‘superfluous’ ornament, which is not the same thing. It is unlikely that Muthesius would have been able to hold together his heterogeneous organisation if he had deprived one whole wing of it – the artist-designers – of the only element they were trained in or capable of contributing, and he nowhere inveighs against ornament as such. Behrens likewise shows a divided attitude on the subject – his products for industrial users are undecorated, but those for domestic use are ornate, and Gropius shows himself a capable ornamentalist in his fabric designs, etc. 1913-1914. 
穆特修斯对“次要元素”的限制特别针对的是装饰；而通过审视德意志制造联盟的产品可以发现，限制的只是“过多的”装饰，与之（反对装饰）是两码事。穆特修斯很难做到自折羽翼的来痛斥“装饰”。同样的，贝伦斯对装饰这个问题也表现出分裂的态度——为工业化用途而做的设计是没有装饰的，但是为家庭所做的设计却是华丽装饰的；格罗皮乌斯在他的设计中也呈现出装饰家的姿态，例如在1913-1914年间。
But Karl Gross’s article also reveals a qualifying factor in Werkbund discussions that may be no more than a verbal quibble, or may be the touchstone that distinguishes justifiable ornament from superfluous ornament. It first appears as a question that can hardly be rendered into English

    Muss Schmuck denn ohne weiteres Ornament sein?

because no two English words (e.g. Decoration/Ornament) carry the distinction that Gross makes between Schmuck and Ornament. The general sense of Schmuck appear clearly enough in a later sentence

    Der erste Schmuck eines Gebaüdes ist gute Massenverteilung
    (The prime ornament of a building is a good arrangement of the masses)

which seems to be comparable to the implication of a passage from Lamprecht cited by Worringer

    …architecture, apart from its more or less ornamental accessories, such as the comprehension of space…
也许Karl Gross的文章可以作为分辨“适度装饰”和“过度装饰”的试金石。然而有个问题，他的话仿佛很难用英语来呈现：Muss Schmuck denn ohne weiteres Ornament sein?（Schmuck不能再有进一步的Ornament了么？）因为在英语中，无法找出两个词语（例如decoration和ornament）来相对应的表达德语词Schmuck和Ornament的差异。Schmuck的一般含义在后来的文字中有了足够清晰的表达：Der erste Schmuck eines Gebaüdes ist gute Massenverteilung（一个建筑的主要装饰是对体量的好的处理）......
But, in any case, this is only the erste Schmuck, and he nowhere renders precise the point at which degrees of Schmuck begin to shade off towards Ornament. And beyond this, though he is clearly dissatisfied with some contemporary ornament (in his second sense), he dose not turn his back on it in general. In fact he looks forward to an Ornamentik of the twentieth century...

...his solution does not envisage those formal and intellectual disciplines proposed by Muthesius, nor the absolute anathema proposed already by Loos, but simply a call for Qualität 

    Decoration, even ornament in the technical sense, must remain quality work when we set out on the road to twentieth-century ornament.
    If ornament is to be again what it once was and must remain, a particular distinction that lifts an object out of the general mass, it muss be quality work.
    The power of survival of the artistic handicrafts rests directly on this premise.

Here we have a writer belonging to the most progressive body in the field of design at the time, taking a line that was to be specifically rejected by the next generation of designers belonging to that body, who turned against ornament of any kind, and accepted Loos’s views on the subject so wholeheartedly that he had to complain of plagiarism. For him, the idea of a nineteenth-century Ornamentik, was insupportable, let alone an Ornamentik of the twentieth century, and for him ornament was irretrievably connected with poor-quality goods.
然而，这只是“主要装饰”，并且他并没有清晰的指出在何种程度上，Schmuck就退让于Ornament。除此之外，尽管Karl Gross对当时的装饰(Ornament)表示出明显的不满，但是他并未对装饰这个问题不加理睬。他期待着20世纪的装饰流派(Ornamentik)……
他对装饰的解读，并未直视穆特修斯或者路斯的观点，而是提出对“品质”(Qualität)的号召……
Karl Gross属于那个时代的设计领域内的改革派，并且完全接受了Loos对于装饰问题的观点......
The reason why Loos’s ideas prevailed over a more cautious attitude lies largely in three factors. Firstly, his absolute anathema on ornament solved Gross’s problem (and everyone else’s) by a swift and surgical means. Secondly, he was timely and specific. At a time when Art Nouveau was falling into discredit, his attack on ornament was launched against named Art Nouveau designers, as well as more generally. And thirdly, his mode of expression gave his argument unwonted force. Both argument and style are effectively summed up in the opening paragraphs of Ornament and Crime.
...
The urge to ornament oneself and everything within reach is the ancestor of pictorial art. It is the baby talk of painting. All art is erotic.
The first ornament born, the cross, is of erotic origin; the earliest art-work, the first creative act of the original artist was smudged on the cave wall to let off emotional steam – a horizontal stroke, the reclining woman; a vertical one, the man who transfixes her. The man who did this felt the same impulse as Beethoven, was in the same heaven of delight as Beethoven composing the Ninth. But the man of our own times who smudges erotic eymbols on walls is either a criminal or a degenerate. It is clear that this violent impulse might seize one or two unbalanced individuals in even the most advanced cultures, but as a general rule one can rank the cultures of different peoples by the extent to which their lavatory walls have been drawn upon. With children this is a natural condition, their first artistic expressions are erotic scribblings on the nursery walls. But what is natural to children and Papuan savages is a symptom of degeneration in modern man.
I have therefore evolved the following maxim, and pronounce it to the world: the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.
最初的装饰，十字形，从起源上便含有性爱的意味；最早的艺术作品，那些由最原始的艺术家们画在岩洞墙壁上的绘画，是对情感的充分释放——横向的一笔，表示一个斜躺的女人；竖向的一笔，是一个穿过这女人的男人。这个男人感受到的是与贝多芬同样的刺激，他置身于喜悦的天堂，正如贝多芬创作《第九交响曲》时所感受到的那样。但是，在我们这个时代，在墙上涂抹性爱图像的人，不是罪犯就是一个堕落的人。……对儿童来说，他们最初的艺术表达就是画在幼儿园墙上的性爱涂鸦。但是，儿童和巴布亚原始人的自然行为，对于一个现代人来说，却是一种退化的象征。
因此我发展出以下结论：文化的演进与对（实用性物体的）装饰的限制是同步的。
...
Above all, there was his specific attack on named masters of Art Nouveau, which undoubtedly helped to galvanise a hitherto vague and unorganised distrust into a definite feeling that – at least – Art Nouveau was a past mistake that should not be made again.
...
The specificity and personal nature of this attack have subsequently been somewhat obscured, but they need to be re-emphasised here for reasons that will appear later. Ornament and Crime, whatever else it may have become, was originally an attack on the Wiener Sezession, and the Wiener Werkstätte, with whom Loos had a quarrel going back into the Nineties, occasioned, it would appear, by Josef Hoffmann’s failure to entrust him with the decoration and furnishing of the Sezession council chamber. The fact that he is only attacking contemporary ornament and contemporary ornamentalists is brought out by the last paragraph of the essay which ends
… and modern man may use the ornament of historic and exotic cultures at his discretion, but his own inventive talents are reserved and concentrated on other things.
路斯抨击“新艺术运动”，自然也不放过“维也纳分离派”。
Loos, in fact, is quite permissive to the ornamental activities of those whom he regards as cultrurally lagging – earlier civilisations, primitive persons, even the labouring poor of Vienna. It is only sophisticated decoration by trained artists of his own time that he attacks, and he himself is fully prepared to use, e.g. the Doric order, when he feels that the situation requires it.
实际上，路斯对那些进行装饰活动的、被他称之为“文化落后”者是相当宽容的……他抨击的对象只是那些训练有素的进行精细装饰的同时代艺术家们，并且他自己随时准备好在合适的场合使用多立克柱式。
Also, like many reformers, he was a Traditionalist and tended to look backward, not forward. One does not find him attacking Ruskin, as Marinetti was to do. In spite of his inevitable distrust for the Deutscher Werkbund (which he seems to regard as a plot of artists to batten on classes of production that ought to be unornamented, the imposition of a false style) he thanked Muthesius in print for Das Englische Haus, and was attached to the English cottage tradition as epitomised in the English Free architecture. He took tradition-bound English tailoring as a model of reticent good taste...
同样，像许多改革者一样，路斯是一个传统主义者，他趋向于回顾过去，而非展望未来。他并像Marinetti那样攻击拉斯金。尽管他必然不信任德意志制造联盟，他仍感谢穆特修斯出版了Das Englische Haus, 并迷恋英国的传统村舍、欣赏英国传统成衣制造......
A Traditionalist, he was also a Classicist, as the frequent use of Classical details – the coffered ceiling of the American Bar in Vienna, for instance – in his buildings shows, but one can be more specific than this; he was also a Schinkelist. Just as the last paragraph of Ornament and Crime reveals, unexpectedly, a permissive attitude to the ornament of the past, the concluding paragraph of Architektur reveals, somewhat unexpectedly in view of the rest of the essay, a touching faith in the value of the Schinkelschüler tradition...
他还是一名古典主义者，正如他在建筑中频繁使用古典式细部——例如维也纳的American Bar的格子天花；他同时还是一名“辛克尔主义者”......在Architektur一文中表现出他对辛克尔传统的深挚信仰......
One cannot help finding this parting apotheosis of Schinkel somewhat surprising, because the preceding paragraphs of Architektur had been rather anti-Greek in tendency. The ancient Greeks are abused for excessive attention to original detailing and, by inference from the fact that Romans were praised for not doing so, inventing new order after Doric. The Parthenon is despised for being painted – a point that later Modern-Movement Classicists were happy to overlook. It is Rome and Roman architecture (as he understood them) that receive Loos’s approbation.
路斯虽推崇辛克尔，却反对古希腊建筑的过度装饰。他赞许古罗马建筑。
Taking a stand on the authority of the plan, Loos brings himself close – closer than anywhere else – to the body of academic discipline. But it is strange that he should praise Roman architecture here and not mention what other German-speaking theorists found praiseworthy in it, Raumgestaltung, nor mention what French theorists found praiseworthy, construction. This highly abstract view of Roman building is balanced against a curiously primitive view of the nature of architecture in general. Continuing to work backwards through the essay, we find him preceding his praise of Rome with a demonstration of his idea that architecture must affect the emotions, and using as an illustrative image the following

    when we find a mound of earth in the woods, six feet long and three feet wide, shovelled up into the shape, of a pyramid, them we turn serious, and a voice inside us says ‘Here lies…’ That is Architecture.

……然而奇怪的是，路斯一边颂扬着古罗马建筑，却缄口不提其它德语系理论家对古罗马建筑的室内空间塑造(Raumgestaltung)的葆赞，或者是法国理论家对其结构(construction)的称颂……从路斯的文中，我们可以看出，他对古罗马建筑的肯定意在证明自己的观点，即建筑必须表达情感，并用下述想象来作为例证：
当我们在森林中发现一个土堆的时候，此土堆有六英尺长三英尺宽，并堆成金字塔形状，我们的内在发出一个声音“这里便是……”这就是建筑。
Now this is not Abstract; as with the cross, the first art work smudged on the cave wall; it is symbolic, it communicates information as well as emotion, unlike Geoffrey Scott’s empathetic responses to architectural form. In spite of the apparent contradiction of his insistence on the plan in Roman architecture, it seems doubtful if, for Loos, the seeming Abstract was ever completely so, whether the purity of Pure Form ever really interested him as anything other than a symbol of purity of mind.

This view of Loos is reinforced by the opening paragraphs of Architektur, which bring together several of his pet aversions and admiration. He sets a scene on the shores of a mountain lake, and commends the homogeneity of character of the scene; everything in it, mountains, water, peasant houses, trees and clouds, all seem shaped by the hand of God. But

    Here – what is this? A false note, a scream out of place. Among the houses of the peasants, which were made not by them but by God, stands a villa. Is it the work of a good architect or a bad one? I don’t know. I only know that the peace and beauty of the scene have been ruined.
    …how is it that every architect, good or bad, causes harm to the lake?
    The peasant doesn’t do this, nor the engineer who builds a railway on the shore or sends ships to plough their deep furrows in the waters of the lake.
……路斯在Architektur一文中设置了一个山中湖岸的场景，并对其中所有一切（山、水、农宅、树木和云等）做了评论……
It is clear, though hardly explicit, in the following paragraphs that the peasant builds well, in harmony with the universe, because he builds without thinking about architecture, and without interference from architects. So, presumably, does the engineer in Loos’s view, though he does not refer to engineers again in the essay. Now, to build without interference from architects, and their preoccupations with style and the Styles, has for Loos at this juncture an important consequence. Without direction from an architect
  
    der Baumeister Könnte nur Häuser bauen: im Stile seiner Zeit.
显然，路斯认为农夫（推测也包括工程师）的建造活动并未考虑“建筑学”，亦并未受到建筑师的干扰。远离了建筑师干扰的建造，他们对于style和Styles的关注，成为路斯在此接合点上的一个重要结论。脱离了建筑师的指导，建造者可以只是盖房子：以他的时代的风格。
In the style of his own time, can only mean, in Loos’s view of the evolution of ornament and culture, in an undecorated style. Freedom from ornament is the symbol of an uncorrupted mind, a mind which he only attributes to peasants and engineers. In this view succeeding generations were to follow him, thus laying further foundations to the idea of engineers as noble savages (to which Marinetti also contributed) and also – and this is vital in the creation of the International Style – laying further foundations to the idea that to build without decoration is to build like an engineer, and thus in a manner proper to a Machine Age.
以路斯的对装饰和文化的演化的观点来看，“他的时代风格”，仅仅意味着，一个没有装饰的风格。脱离装饰是一个不腐朽的精神的象征，他仅将此精神归于农夫和工程师。后辈们继承了路斯的观点，并从而建立了更加坚固的理论基础，一是把工程师看作“高贵的原始人”，同时——这一点是创造“国际样式”的关键——提出无装饰的建造即像机械般的建造的观点，这也是一种对“机械时代”的适当回应。