揽瓜阁俱乐部第二期 Day11 2020.06.25
【人文科学-建筑】 Pyongyang’s Retro Sci-Fi Architecture （890字 精读 必做篇）
In July 2015, the two of us stepped off a plane at the newly opened airport in Pyongyang, North Korea. It was our first time in the country. As architects based in Beijing, we were well acquainted with the world’s cities and skyscrapers, but North Korea was a dark spot in our mental map — filled in, as it was for most people, by preconceptions and stereotypes that rendered the so-called Hermit Kingdom in black and white. We had tried to leave those ideas behind, but we didn’t expect that this first visit would leave us with such a sense of confusion, one where the difference between what was real and genuine was muddled by what was ostensibly staged or faked.
As soon as we left, we knew we had to return. Over the next four years we made three more visits, facilitated by a Beijing-based travel company called Koryo Tours. Over time we decided to try to represent the complicated reality of Pyongyang through photography, which ended up in the form of a book, “Model City: Pyongyang.”
Pyongyang, a city of 3.2 million people, has a long history, but it was largely rebuilt after the Korean War (called the “American War” in North Korea) by the newly founded Communist government, which intended it to be a model city for a new society. North Korean society is built around “juche ideology,” a homegrown form of socialism based on self-reliance, and it infuses everything in the city, especially the architecture. “On Architecture,” an essay by Kim Jong Il, who ruled from 1994 to 2011, sets out juche-informed rules regarding axis, control of heights, framing of space and so on, and they are recognizable everywhere in the city.
Still, different architectural phases are noticeable in the city, from an early radical, brutalist period to the modernist and postmodern, up to the new developments created under the current leader, Kim Jong Un, where pastel colors and futuristic shapes are applied to super high-rise buildings, in a retro science-fiction style.
Architects have long dreamed of such “total planning,” so it was not difficult for us to fall in love with this city. We wanted to reveal to the world its beauty, a beauty of a different kind, to be preserved when a necessary and inevitable change will eventually occur. In the last four years, the initial fascination we had as architects slowly transformed into empathy for a city with such a strong and peculiar cultural identity, and especially for its people, for whom we hope the future will unfold for the better.
Our photography portrays the puzzling feeling of “fictional reality” that we experienced in North Korea. We took inspiration from a ubiquitous feature in North Korean art: In painting, sculpture and propaganda posters, the sky is represented as a simple gradient of colors, like a hyper-saturated sunset or sunrise, transforming the real into the ideal, a metaphor for the “utopia” of Pyongyang itself. The buildings and cityscapes in the book are framed using a classical architectural approach, with no significant editing, while the sky is completely replaced by a soft gradient of pastel colors, taken from the color palette used by Korean artists for the posters or by the architects for the facades. The contrast between the two parts of the photographs creates a visual juxtaposition where the real part (the building or the city) looks unreal and the unreal part (the sky) could actually be real.
Sticking to the rules is part of the game when you decide to go to North Korea. We won the trust of our guides, the only Koreans we had the opportunity to interact with. This trust not only gave us a certain level of freedom in photographing and getting information but also allowed us to achieve a closer human relationship with them, so we could talk about our lives and their lives, our reality and their reality.
We were amazed by some of our interactions. For example, one of them asked us if Michael Jackson had really died. We were in North Korea on Nov. 9, 2016, with no access to the news, and our guides — surprisingly — informed us about the election of Donald Trump. We met the architect who designed the new Pyongyang airport (which was a surprise, as some media reports said he had been killed because Kim Jong Un didn’t like the design), and we discovered that he spoke perfect Italian, having studied in Rome for five years. We ate a kimchi pizza together in a new futuristic residential neighborhood, and we ended up in a karaoke bar singing “Bella Ciao,” an old Italian song of the resistance against fascism, with our guides. They all knew the lyrics by heart.
The human side of Pyongyang is barely visible in the book; people are small presences in the grand urban space or in front of gigantic statues. But it’s there if you look carefully. For all the sober, clean, monumental urban structures, there are hidden spaces for leisure and entertainment, like the many parks — the city is one of the greenest in Asia — where people enjoy picnicking, singing and rollerblading. The political space of Kim Il Sung Square, where military parades and mass dances take place, faces the quiet riverfront stroll on the Taedong River, where people walk with children and enjoy the afternoon light.
Source: The New York Times
【人文科学-建筑】 Scenic City Sights Linked to Higher Happiness （363字 2分13秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
One of the ugliest sights in Great Britain is a small power station outside Plymouth, England, its electrical lines and towers surrounded by a drab-colored fence. I know this not because I've been there—but because a photo of it has scored a measly 1 out of 10 on an online game called Scenic or Not. The game has viewers rate photos from all over the U.K. on their scenic beauty.
After a million and a half ratings of more than 200,000 photos, the site has classified more than 93 percent of Great Britain as scenic, or not, or somewhere in between. And now, a study in the journal Scientific Reports has used that data to show that our happiness increases in line with the scenic beauty around us. Which might sound kind of obvious.
"But what was I think surprising is we find that connection when they're in more built-up areas as well. So it's not just a natural area that might have an impact on happiness, but we might also feel happier in more beautiful areas in our cities."
Chanuki Seresinhe is a data scientist at the Warwick Business School and the Alan Turing Institute. Seresinhe and her team used data from the "Mappiness" iPhone app—which polled some 15,000 participants about their wellbeing a few times a day, over a three-year period. The app also pulled GPS data, which allowed Seresinhe and her team to correlate happiness ratings with the Scenic-or-Not rating of where a participant happened to be. The team found that as scenic beauty goes up, so does self-reported wellbeing. And that held true for areas featuring picturesque human-built structures, such as bridges and interesting architecture.
And though it's just a correlation for now, "I think what's interesting about this research is it shows that just a small injection of beauty into an area of a city can actually create happiness for possibly thousands of people that are being exposed to that."
Which could come in handy. Because the global population is forecast to grow to 11 billion by the end of the century—living mostly in cities. Which should be built to be as appealing as possible.
Source: Scientific American
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-6-24 20:27:48
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