救命啊. 这篇文章谁看得懂, 可不可以用英文帮我讲一下. 万分感谢.

幻影泡沫UID: 158550

Lisa Robertson
Soft Architecture: A Manifesto


The worn cotton sheets of our little beds had the blurred texture of silk crepe and when we lay between them in the evening we'd rub, rhythmically, one foot against the soothing folds of fabric, waiting for sleep. That way we wore through the thinning cloth. Our feet would get tangled in the fretted gap.

We walked through the soft arcade. We became an architect.

The knitted cap on the wrinkled skull of the mewling kid is the first boundary. At the other tip the bootie dribbles. There are curious histories of shrouds. That is not all. Memory's architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft.

Of course it's all myth. Beginning with the rooms ranked in small stone Natufian couples co-mingled in kisses, the perspex galleries of pendant Babylonian dollies, the long halls of Egyptian cats that are sirens or dynasties, we amble towards the disappearance of godliness into cloth. Europe's lusty godlets start bending. Carved cloth connotes the wild swirls of the christly sexual parts. Sprigged calico greets the renaissance of Venus. Prudery flows animate, clinging, vivid-- we think it absorbs virility from naked antiquity herself. Strolling from Byzantium we observe her teasing retreat. The mischievous and the sexy gods get dressed as patrons and courtesans and popes, crinolined in Fragonard's stiff satins, diminished to tiny petticoated players in painted enamel frolics. Finally invisible they loll in the conventions of canvas, or in the draperies and objets of the rooms themselves, such as the Frick's watered mohair swags, the personified tapestry walls, the little pettipoint chairs personified, the chamberpot, the silken floor personified.

We arrive at our long century. We note that the holy modernism of the white room is draped and lined in its newness by labile counter-structures of moving silk, fur, leather, onyx, velvet. The modernist inventors of the moot science of psychoanalysis raise its cold visage from the deep upholsteries and ruched cushions of the speaking invalid's couch. A contemporary describes the late Maria Callas' vibrato as "a worn velvet that has lost the evenness of its texture." As for us, we wear avant-thrift. We sit in spider-like chairs. But soft architecture expires invisibly as the mass rhetorics of structural permanence transmit: who can say when the astonishing complicities of the woven decay into rote? The bare ruin and the long autopsy of concepts serve as emblems of Soft Architecture's demise.

Yet our city is persistently soft. We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks, a camp for a navy trying to return to a place that has disappeared. So the camp is a permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents--tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper and various claddings--tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers. At the centre of the tent encampment, the density of the temporary in a tantrum of action; on peripheries over silent grass of playing fields the fizzy mauveness of seed fringe hovering. Our favourite on ramp curving sharply round to the cement bridge, left side overhung with a small leafed tree that sprays the roof of our car with its particular vibrato shade. Curved velveteen of asphalt as we merge with the bridge traffic, the guard rails, the inlet, the filmic afternoon. The city is a florescence of surface.

Under the pavement, pavement. Hoaxes, failures, porches, archaeological strata spread out on a continuous thin plane; softness and speed, echoes, spores, tropes, fonts; not identity but incident and the accumulation of air-miles; unmarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment, t.t.t. (tummy touching text), indexical euphorias, the unraveling of laughter; a brief history of escalators; memory migrating among vocabularies, memory manifest, brindled, loosening; a crumpling of automotive glass; the pornographic, the wrapped; helvetica's black dust: All doctrine is foreign to us. The problem of the shape of choice is mainly retrospective. That wild nostalgia leans into the sheer volubility of incompetence. This nostalgia musters symbols with no relation to necessity--civic sequins, apertures that record and tend the fickleness of social gifts. Containing only supple space, nostalgia feeds our imagination's strategic ineptitude. Forget the journals, conferences, salons, textbooks and media of dissemination. We say thought's object is not knowledge but living. We do not like it elsewhere.

The truly utopian act is to manifest current conditions and dialects. Practise description. Description is mystical. It's afterlife because it's life's reflection or reverse. Place is accident posing as politics. And vice versa. Therefore it's tragic and big.

It's OK for Adorno to ( ) but we recommenders of present action have learned to say "perhaps" our bodies produce space; "perhaps" our words make a bunting canopy; "perhaps" the handstruck, palpable wall is an anti-discipline; "perhaps" by the term everyday life we also mean the potential. We allude sympathetically to the lyrical tone of clothing and furniture since they clearly reveal to the eye, mind and judgment the real shapes of peopled sentiment. Cravats gushing from collar, we agree with the Soft Architect Lilly Reich that "clothes may also have metaphysical effects by means of their inherent regularity, their coolness and reserve, their coquettish cheerfulness and liveliness, their playful grace, their sound simplicity and their dignity." From the vast urbanity of our counter-discipline we applaud the mercurial Lilly Reich who said "One of my hearts is in building."

Soft Architecture will reverse the wrongheaded story of structural deepness. That institution is all doors, but no entrances. The work of the SA paradoxically recompiles the metaphysics of surface, performing a horizontal research which greets shreds of fibre, pigment flakes, the bleaching of light, proofs of lint, ink, spore, liquid and pixilation, the strange, frail, leaky cloths and sketchings and gestures which we are. The work of the SA, simultaneously strong and weak, makes new descriptions on the warp of former events. By descriptions, we mean moistly critical dreams, morphological thefts, authentic registers of pleasant customs, accidents posing as intentions. SA makes up face-practices.

What if there is no "space," only a permanent slow-motion mystic takeover, an implausibly careening awning? Nothing is Utopian. Everything wants to be. Soft Architects face the reaching middle.

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这是什么文章:confused:

幻影泡沫UID: 158550

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我看不懂,所以请教大家的. 明天就final exam了. 教授比较喜欢arts, 我们算是完了.