建筑英语作文

篇一：关于建筑英语作文(大二)

The two special building in the photos make me feel excited. There is no doubt that both of them cost very much. I can’t imagine that how I feel if I live in one of them at first sight.

The castle in first photo has a Western style, sort of like the White House. It has a big, clear lake and large, green grass which makes me feel serene in my imagination. And the Chinese-style house in the other photo is also fantastic, which is built near the river and has mountains on its back.

In my opinion, the first one is the most luxurious because it occupies much more fields and has much more room for the host. There’s no doubt that it costs much more than the other one.

Not only the serenity but also the beautiful shape make me like the castle most. Therefore, I prefer to live in that castle if I could. If I own one of these buildings, I will feel good but it can’t be enough to make me happy because I have no idea whether my families like it.

To my mind, how much cost of the house is not equal to how much the happiness about living. Every expensive house not only has its advantage but also its disadvantage. For example, the castle that I prefer to live also has something make me uncomfortable. Perhaps I am not accustomed to the style of the house or I may feel alone because there is no neighbor nearby. And the other house may be in danger if it has a heavy rain or a large storm.

篇二：专业建筑英语文章

C I T Y CULTURES

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the

haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea,

lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises

again to the crest of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally

undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation

is momentarily arrested by vision. A gigantic mass is immobilized before our

eyes.

(de Certeau 1988: 91)

Who built it? Anon, that's who. Nobody built the New York skyline. Nobody

by the thousands.

(Helene Hanff, Apple of My Eye, 1984: 35)

Introduction: a city imagined

On 11 September 2001, graphic images of the destruction of two of the

world's tallest buildings - the north and south towers of the World Trade

Center in New York City - unfolded on television sets around the world.

The enormity and complexity of this tragedy, while manifest, were, nevertheless,

compounded by the fact that most people witnessed it as a media

spectacle. Thus, it was within established media interpretative frames

(including the plots and images of countless Hollywood movies) that their

initial reactions were formed. But then in many respects New York is a

media construction - the skyline of Manhattan is instantly and globally

familiar even though the majority of the world's population has never been

there and will never go. Indeed, Manhattan emerged as a landscape of

towers at the same time as film technology and the movie industry were

developing in the United States. It was largely as a result of this coincidence

that the Manhattan backdrop became one of the most significant and defining

images not just of architectural modernism, but also of the values and

achievements of the twentieth century. Manhattan equals Neiy York and

New York is perhaps the world's greatest city. It was within this set of imaginings that in the early 1970s the 'twin towers' assumed their place both as

potent symbols of late modernity and testimonies to the global economic

power of New York and the United States. Rising 411 metres above ground

level, the towers dominated the city's skyline and provided some of the most

sought-after postcard views and establishing shots of New York. The

destruction of the towers, therefore, was considerably more than a personal

or local tragedy. It was imbued with a range of national, global, cultural,

urban and symbolic significances. Indeed, it went to the core of what it

meant to be 'modern'.

Those who are old enough can remember when the twin towers passed

the Empire State building (also in New York City) as the world's tallest

buildings. Even in the 1970s, such 'facts' were still regarded as important

markers of 'man's' ability to 'conquer' nature and nowhere was evidence of

this supremacy more visible and irrefutable than in the great cities of the

world and their architectural and engineering triumphs - in particular, their

bridges and skyscrapers. The metropol(转 载 于:wWW.zw2.Cn 爱作文网)is was the antithesis of nature and the

symbol of its defeat. In order to appreciate the depth of this sentiment and

the cultural significances that the New York skyline came to assume, it is

necessary first to understand the social and economic contexts within which

its early skyscrapers were constructed and the skyscraper building frenzy

that gripped New York between the First World War and the great depression

of the 1930s.

Robert Hughes (1997: 404ff) suggests in his book American Visions

about the history of American art that it was during this period that the

New York skyscraper emerged both as a cultural icon and artform. He

argues that from 1926 in particular, the building boom in New York was

dominated by a 'race to the sky' - a race ultimately won by the Empire State

building on its completion in 1930. Skyscrapers were seen as heroic not only

because of their breathtaking height. The entire process of building them

was regarded with fascination and awe, while speculation abounded regarding

how high these buildings might eventually go. In addition, key milestones

reached during the construction of many skyscrapers became the

focus of public celebrations which often featured such attractions as 'girl

dancers [being] hired to perform on . . . bare girders, hundreds of feet up in

the dizzying air, for the avid media' (Hughes 1997: 405). Needless to say, it

was opportunistic local politicians and the commercial enterprises responsible

for building the towers who staged such promotional stunts. Until the

early 1930s, the construction, completion, official opening and final form

of each new skyscraper were events - central elements of the spectacle of

New York City. What developed, according to Hughes (1997: 405) was a

'romance' between New Yorkers, their skyscrapers and their city. Although

all Americans 'were dazed by the force of their new imagery' (Hughes 1997:

405) to such an extent that, Hughes goes on to assert:

No American painting or sculpture . . . was able to accumulate, at least

in the ordinary public's eyes, the kind of cultural power that the skyscrapers

had. Nor indeed, could it have done so - most Americans

didn't care about art, especially modern art . . . Big buildings were

always before you; mere paintings were not.

(Hughes 1997: 419)

And courtesy of film, art and photography the 'big buildings' were also

'before' the rest of the world, and it too was mesmerized. The landscape of

New York looked vastly different from those of European cities:

In Paris, only monumental buildings devoted to sacred or governmental

institutions were allowed to exceed the height limit; in London, only

purely ornamental towers could rise above the roofscape. In New York,

however, the soaring commercial tower had already become the salient

ornament of the city-scape and the inalienable right of realtors.

(Stern et al. 1987:508)

One visits New York first and foremost to see and experience its landscape.

In the passage quoted at the start of this chapter cultural theorist Michel de

Certeau describes the elation he felt at seeing (from the observation deck of

the World Trade Center) the city of New York laid out and 'immobilized'

before him. Similarly, Philip Kasinitz (1995), echoing de Certeau, celebrates

the world's 'great' cities (and the significant structures we gaze on them

from) in the following way:

The exhilaration we feel when we view a great city from one of those

rare vantage points where one can 'take it all in' - Paris from the Eiffel

Tower, Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge - is the thrill of

seeing in one moment the enormity of . . . human work.

(Kasinitz 1995: 3)

Despite the 'exhilaration' that might be felt when viewing a 'great' city from

the top of a 'great' built structure, our feelings towards the city and its skyscrapers are also deeply contradictory, being simultaneously sources of

exhilaration, fear and apprehension - 'cities are great as well as fearsome'

(Zukin 1997: vii). They also 'represent the basest instincts of human society'

(Zukin 1997: 1). We are aware of this ambiguity even as we celebrate them

- we are both attracted and repelled. Viewing a city from a great height is

a way of taming it. However, the observer is also rendered ifolnerable by the

experience. In order to journey to the top of a skyscraper one must trust in

the knowledge and skills of countless faceless 'experts' - builders, engineers,

labourers, maintenance workers and architects. This trusting is, as Anthony

Giddens (1990) explains, a core feature of late modernity. The helplessness

felt when watching the wounded towers of the World Trade Center crumble

onto the streets of lower Manhattan revealed the ambivalence with which

we regard the skyscraper and the fragility of our trust in the expert knowledge

systems on which we rely.

In art, too, the 'darker side' of our relationship with the city and the skyscraper

has also been explored/exposed. The city's looming shapes frequently

have been compelling symbols of danger and the unknown even as

they speak of progress, modernity and the future. For instance, the plays of

light and shade featured in Hugh Ferriss's (1929, 1953) architectural renderings

of New York in the 1920s create brooding landscapes that capture

the conflicting emotions stimulated by cityspace and the skyscraper. In many

of Ferriss's drawings the tops of skyscrapers are shrouded in shadow while

their bottoms - those edges encountered on the street - are luminous. The

result evokes notions of the known and the unknown. What is known is

what can be seen at street level, while what is unknown looms in the twilight

above. In representing the ideas and urban imaginings of those architects

who were at the forefront of reshaping the Manhattan skyline, Ferriss's

work was as much about the city as its future was being imagined during

this period of skyscraper-building as it was about the city at the time. His

representations were of an urban and architectural Utopia that was inspired

by the present and made possible by contemporary technology but which

was yet to take shape.

Many key themes in the study, interpretation and experience of cities

coalesced around the events of 11 September and, thus, this moment points

to a host of issues that underpin the concerns of this book - in particular,

the nature of (post)modern urbanism, the ambivalent relationship that exists

between people and their cities, and the various ways in which this relationship

is shaped through experience, imagination and power. The academic

study of the city is an endeavour that can be traced back to the nineteenth

century and the work of the 'founding fathers' of sociology, including Karl

Marx, Friedrich Engels and Max Weber. Sociology was concerned with

industrialization and modernity - and as cities were the places where the

consequences and contradictions of both were most evident and most profoundly

experienced, they became the almost accidental objects of their

attention. During the twentieth century, however, a specific urban subdiscipline

developed within sociology and continues to be a major field of

enquiry. The concerns of urban sociologists have been varied, though, not

just in terms of their particular urban object of study but also methodologically

and theoretically. Research has focused variously on such issues as

defining and quantifying urbanism, exploring the relationship between the

city and society, and investigating the role of the state in framing urban

development. Thus urban sociology has connected with and informed the

work of many within other disciplines, including human geography, urban

planning, economics and urban history.

Since the 1970s, the city has become a source of fascination for those

working outside established urban studies traditions as an increasing

number of cultural theorists started to focus on the city as it is lived rather

than on its structures and patterns. At the same time sociology and its established methods and interpretative frames were (paradoxically) both being

challenged and augmented by the insights of cultural theory. The result of

these differing influences has been the opening of a number of potentially

fruitful pathways for urban research and analysis, as Rosalyn Deutsche

(1996) explains:

Now there is growing interest in interdisciplinary mergers of critical

urban and cultural discourses. On the one hand, aesthetic practitioners

- architects, urban planners, artists - have used the contributions of

urban theory to examine how their work functions in urban social contexts.

Urban scholars, on the other hand, have turned to cultural theory

to study the city as a signifying object. Both groups hope that encounters

between the two fields - themselves composed of several disciplines

- will expand our ability to understand and intervene in what urban

theorists call the politics of place.

(Deutsche 1996: 206)

Too often, though, dialogue between the cultural studies and more sociological

approaches to the urban has not been easy and attempts to bring the

considerable insights of each together have often been strained {Morris

1992; Deutsche 1996). Thus, as academics seek to understand the fabric of

the urban environment and the cultures of everyday urban life, there are

those more sociologically informed analyses which continue to emphasize

the role of the city in fostering social and cultural inequality, arguing that

the urban landscape is implicated in structural oppression and marginalization,

in particular those based on class, gender, race and ethnicity. While, on

the other hand, many cultural studies approaches to urbanism regard the

city as a significant site of empowerment and resistance, with academics

working within this broad tradition often seeking to celebrate lived urban

rhythms, anonymity and difference.

The challenge of exploring both approaches and making some connections

is taken up in this book. Cities and Urban Cultures seeks to make sense

of a range of culturally informed theories of the city by considering them

alongside broader (established) urban studies traditions. A central underpinning

assumption of the book is that these seemingly contradictory

approaches can, in shirting combinations, provide rich complementary conceptual and empirical insights into the complex cultures of urbanism. From

this intellectual foundation Cities and Urban Cultures also explores some

of the key themes in the study and the development of the city since the

industrial revolution.

城市文化

看到曼哈顿110层的世界贸易中心。在霾挑唆被风吹、城市岛,海在海中,举起摩天大楼在华尔街,沉下来,然后在格林威治上升再建,安静地穿过市中心中央公园,最后undulates走开进入距离超出哈莱姆区。纵向的浪潮。它的风是瞬间被视觉。质量是一个庞大的固定在我们 眼睛。

(德Certeau 1988:91)

究竟是谁建造了吗?马上就来,那是谁。没有人建造了纽约的地平线。没有人成千上万的。 (海伦汉芙、苹果我的眼睛,1984:35)

简介:一个城市想象

2001年9月11日,图形图片的破坏的两个

篇三：建筑专业英语文章

C I T Y CULTURES Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crest of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. A gigantic mass is immobilized before our eyes. (de Certeau 1988: 91) Who built it? Anon, that's who. Nobody built the New York skyline. Nobody by the thousands. (Helene Hanff, Apple of My Eye, 1984: 35) Introduction: a city imagined On 11 September 2001, graphic images of the destruction of two of the world's tallest buildings - the north and south towers of the World Trade Center in New York City - unfolded on television sets around the world. The enormity and complexity of this tragedy, while manifest, were, nevertheless, compounded by the fact that most people witnessed it as a media spectacle. Thus, it was within established media interpretative frames (including the plots and images of countless Hollywood movies) that their initial reactions were formed. But then in many respects New York is a media construction - the skyline of Manhattan is instantly and globally familiar even though the majority of the world's population has never been there and will never go. Indeed, Manhattan emerged as a landscape of towers at the same time as film technology and the movie industry were developing in the United States. It was largely as a result of this coincidence that the Manhattan backdrop became one of the most significant and defining images not just of architectural modernism, but also of the values and achievements of the twentieth century. Manhattan equals Neiy York and New York is perhaps the world's greatest city. It was within this set of imaginings that in the early 1970s the 'twin towers' assumed their place both as potent symbols of late modernity and testimonies to the global economic power of New

York and the United States. Rising 411 metres above ground level, the towers dominated the city's skyline and provided some of the most sought-after postcard views and establishing shots of New York. The destruction of the towers, therefore, was considerably more than a personal or local tragedy. It was imbued with a range of national, global, cultural, urban and symbolic significances. Indeed, it went to the core of what it meant to be 'modern'. Those who are old enough can remember when the twin towers passed the Empire State building (also in New York City) as the world's tallest buildings. Even in the 1970s, such 'facts' were still regarded as important markers of 'man's' ability to 'conquer' nature and nowhere was evidence of this supremacy more visible and irrefutable than in the great cities of the world and their architectural and engineering triumphs - in particular, their bridges and skyscrapers. The metropolis was the antithesis of nature and the symbol of its defeat. In order to appreciate the depth of this sentiment and the cultural significances that the New York skyline came to assume, it is necessary first to understand the social and economic contexts within which its early skyscrapers were constructed and the skyscraper building frenzy that gripped New York between the First World War and the great depression of the 1930s. Robert Hughes (1997: 404ff) suggests in his book American Visions about the history of American art that it was during this period that the New York skyscraper emerged both as a cultural icon and artform. He argues that from 1926 in particular, the building boom in New York was dominated by a 'race to the sky' - a race ultimately won by the Empire State building on its completion in 1930. Skyscrapers were seen as heroic not only because of their breathtaking height. The entire process of building them was regarded with fascination and awe, while speculation abounded regarding how high these buildings might eventually go. In addition, key milestones reached during the construction of

many skyscrapers became the focus of public celebrations which often featured such attractions as 'girl dancers [being] hired to perform on . . . bare girders, hundreds of feet up in the dizzying air, for the avid media' (Hughes 1997: 405). Needless to say, it was opportunistic local politicians and the commercial enterprises responsible for building the towers who staged such promotional stunts. Until the early 1930s, the construction, completion, official opening and final form of each new skyscraper were events - central elements of the spectacle of New York City. What developed, according to Hughes (1997: 405) was a 'romance' between New Yorkers, their skyscrapers and their city. Although all Americans 'were dazed by the force of their new imagery' (Hughes 1997: 405) to such an extent that, Hughes goes on to assert: No American painting or sculpture . . . was able to accumulate, at least in the ordinary public's eyes, the kind of cultural power that the skyscrapers had. Nor indeed, could it have done so - most Americans didn't care about art, especially modern art . . . Big buildings were always before you; mere paintings were not. (Hughes 1997: 419) And courtesy of film, art and photography the 'big buildings' were also 'before' the rest of the world, and it too was mesmerized. The landscape of New York looked vastly different from those of European cities: In Paris, only monumental buildings devoted to sacred or governmental institutions were allowed to exceed the height limit; in London, only purely ornamental towers could rise above the roofscape. In New York, however, the soaring commercial tower had already become the salient ornament of the city-scape and the inalienable right of realtors. (Stern et al. 1987:508) One visits New York first and foremost to see and experience its landscape. In the passage quoted at the start of this chapter cultural theorist Michel de Certeau describes the elation he felt at seeing (from the observation deck of the World Trade Center) the city of New York laid out and 'immobilized' before him. Similarly, Philip Kasinitz

(1995), echoing de Certeau, celebrates the world's 'great' cities (and the significant structures we gaze on them from) in the following way: The exhilaration we feel when we view a great city from one of those rare vantage points where one can 'take it all in' - Paris from the Eiffel Tower, Lower Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge - is the thrill of seeing in one moment the enormity of . . . human work. (Kasinitz 1995: 3) Despite the 'exhilaration' that might be felt when viewing a 'great' city from the top of a 'great' built structure, our feelings towards the city and its skyscrapers are also deeply contradictory, being simultaneously sources of exhilaration, fear and apprehension - 'cities are great as well as fearsome' (Zukin 1997: vii). They also 'represent the basest instincts of human society' (Zukin 1997: 1). We are aware of this ambiguity even as we celebrate them - we are both attracted and repelled. Viewing a city from a great height is a way of taming it. However, the observer is also rendered ifolnerable by the experience. In order to journey to the top of a skyscraper one must trust in the knowledge and skills of countless faceless 'experts' - builders, engineers, labourers, maintenance workers and architects. This trusting is, as Anthony Giddens (1990) explains, a core feature of late modernity. The helplessness felt when watching the wounded towers of the World Trade Center crumble onto the streets of lower Manhattan revealed the ambivalence with which we regard the skyscraper and the fragility of our trust in the expert knowledge systems on which we rely. In art, too, the 'darker side' of our relationship with the city and the skyscraper has also been explored/exposed. The city's looming shapes frequently have been compelling symbols of danger and the unknown even as they speak of progress, modernity and the future. For instance, the plays of light and shade featured in Hugh Ferriss's (1929, 1953) architectural renderings of New York in the 1920s create brooding landscapes that capture the conflicting emotions stimulated by cityspace and the skyscraper. In many of Ferriss's

drawings the tops of skyscrapers are shrouded in shadow while their bottoms - those edges encountered on the street - are luminous. The result evokes notions of the known and the unknown. What is known is what can be seen at street level, while what is unknown looms in the twilight above. In representing the ideas and urban imaginings of those architects who were at the forefront of reshaping the Manhattan skyline, Ferriss's work was as much about the city as its future was being imagined during this period of skyscraper-building as it was about the city at the time. His representations were of an urban and architectural Utopia that was inspired by the present and made possible by contemporary technology but which was yet to take shape. Many key themes in the study, interpretation and experience of cities coalesced around the events of 11 September and, thus, this moment points to a host of issues that underpin the concerns of this book - in particular, the nature of (post)modern urbanism, the ambivalent relationship that exists between people and their cities, and the various ways in which this relationship is shaped through experience, imagination and power. The academic study of the city is an endeavour that can be traced back to the nineteenth century and the work of the 'founding fathers' of sociology, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Max Weber. Sociology was concerned with industrialization and modernity - and as cities were the places where the consequences and contradictions of both were most evident and most profoundly experienced, they became the almost accidental objects of their attention. During the twentieth century, however, a specific urban subdiscipline developed within sociology and continues to be a major field of enquiry. The concerns of urban sociologists have been varied, though, not just in terms of their particular urban object of study but also methodologically and theoretically. Research has focused variously on such issues as defining and quantifying urbanism, exploring the relationship between the city