世界未来城市计划：多少是伦理，多少是美学，多少是科学

张利/ZHANG Li

作者单位：清华大学建筑学院/《世界建筑》

2018年春天，德国著名期刊《建筑世界》主编鲍里斯·沙德-宾索夫造访北京，带来了一个引人注意的消息：在欧洲乃至世界上有广泛影响力的慕尼黑国际博览集团希望能够与中国合作，创立一个不同以往的建筑奖项；这个奖项将不再仅仅表彰建筑作品的形态或建筑师个人的创造性，而是希望表彰建筑为其所在的城市所做出的切实贡献。同时，沙德-宾索夫也讲到，有望邀请到前普利兹克奖的评委克里斯汀·菲莱斯出任这一设想中奖项的第一任评委会主席。这个“设想中的奖项”便是后来的世界未来城市计划（简称IUPA）。2019年和2020年，IUPA已经连续举办了两届。

设立新的建筑奖项并不新奇，但是颇具挑战。其中最明显的挑战有两个：一是当今建筑奖项过剩的现状；二是传统建筑奖项评价体系对当今城市生活新变化的不适应。

应对第一个挑战的策略是相对简单的：新奖项成立的前提是定义新的问题。众所周知，鉴于公共建筑在当今生活中所获得的曝光频度，以建筑奖项来触发公众热议是媒体吸引关注的有效路径。我们甚至看到，在当今的世界，建筑奖项的增加速度已经在某种程度上超过了值得称道的建筑作品的出现速度。一些平庸的建筑奖项因人云亦云而被迅速忘却，另一些则因为另辟蹊径的问题定义而得以留存在续写的建筑故事里，比如聚焦于建筑师的处女作，比如聚焦于建筑生态的负影响端——丑陋建筑，等等。IUPA试图聚焦于建筑对其紧邻的城市环境和城市生活的可辨别的激发作用，既不妄想具备阿卡汗奖般的宏伟的社会运动议程，也不像V·R·格林城市设计奖关注中介尺度及以上的城市设计干预。从2019年到2020年的评审过程中，我们看到的IUPA自身定位也在不断地得到清晰化。

应对第二个挑战要困难得多。建筑奖项的评委会通常由策展人、评论人和建筑师组成，专业素养使他们并不以数字和量度，而以观点和争论评价建筑的品质。在过去把建筑完全作为艺术来评价时，这毫无问题，但是在21世纪的第二个十年，在全球的技术、环境、社会生活已然发生巨大变化的背景下，很少再有人会不假思索地认定建筑还是一门完全自主的独立艺术。建筑是人类进行地表改造活动最主要的见证，也是城市生活最主要的塑造者，必须放在当今人类应对共同危机的范畴内接受检验。那么问题来了：当评价的焦点关注从建筑师的个人创造转向城市人民的群体生活时，传统的建筑批评仍然成立吗？如果说传统的建筑奖项主要通过美学标准来进行评判，那么突出社会和城市问题的新建筑奖项——如IUPA——该以何标准进行评判？在这些标准中，有多少是伦理，有多少是美学？抑或，还有多少是科学？

作为连续参加了两届IUPA评审的人，我想说，这仍然是一个有待思考的问题。我猜其他几位评审专家也会有同样的感觉。不过，尽管我们不能量化地定义究竟有多少伦理、美学或科学是IUPA的评价标准，但是我们可以肯定地告诉公众，IUPA的标准不是什么。

它不是纯粹的伦理。IUPA不认为伦理故事的戏剧化会自然地带来优秀的建筑。当下，我们会时常看到来自偏远地区的建筑作品，讲述建筑和建筑师以英雄孤胆拯救世界的故事。每当此时我们就会在头脑中触发一则警示：无论这种建筑的出发点是多么善良，他们仍然有可能失败，因为真实的生活故事可能与建筑师看到的和讲述的截然不同，因为建筑师有可能脱离他或她所服务的群众。或许我们可以远到1940年代的埃及去观察这类建筑的起源，我们也可能近至当代中国的乡村，去观察不时出现的类似情况。对我们的城市与乡村而言，仅仅有正确的道义与情怀是不够的，深入生活的实效才是硬道理。

它也不是纯粹的科学。显然，IUPA还没有焦虑到这样一种程度，以至于去追逐建筑奖项的一种新潮——要求候选项目提交精确的能源和碳排放统计数字。在20世纪之初，我们曾目睹对数字的膜拜，以及它对建筑人文精神的破坏。然而一个世纪后，随着新兴技术和新数据采集方式的出现，这一膜拜似乎大有卷土重来之势。本届IUPA中一些候选项目竭尽所能，以近乎炫耀的方式展示无所不用其极的环境科技；但遗憾的是，它们对发生于其中的人的活动无动于衷，甚至在建筑的机体中将人的生活边缘化，这是它们最终被评委们拒绝的原因。

当然，它也不是纯粹的美学，不再像曾经的那样。毫无疑问，我们正在目睹一个沉迷于自我指涉的建筑时代的终结——至少是这个终结的开始。我们很兴奋地看到一种全新的建筑愉悦——一种建立在人类最基本的共理怡情，即喜于看到他人享受生活之惬意，并乐于在同一公共场所中与他人分享彼此的惬意之上的共享空间体验——正在出现。在圣保罗，城市高空中义无反顾的游泳池，以及在垂直体量中频繁介入的水平开放楼层，展示一个特别的社区的韧性与乐观精神。在纽约，一个小型图书馆的变体中庭，最大限度地建立了人们的视觉联系，充分利用了日新月异的技术与不断变化的图书馆行为模式，把现代图书馆中阅读功能的淡化诠释成为一种公共美德。在上海，以朴素、柔软的人工地形所连接的油罐再利用空间，让每周数百个家庭的笑容出现在这里，对工业遗产的人性化再造提供了响亮的例证。毋庸置疑，这些美好的项目是通过、并且只有通过睿智的巧妙设计才得以出现。它们似乎在向IUPA的评委们预示某种新的建筑核心价值的出现，也在预示围绕着这一新的建筑核心价值可以构建出的无限美好。也许，这种新的核心价值是人类的同理心？或者，更为朴素的，是对人类常理的深思熟虑的回归？

感谢鲍里斯·沙德-宾索夫先生，是他的远见与严谨使得IUPA与本期《世界建筑》成为可能。

In Spring 2018, when visiting Beijing, the Editor ofBauweltBoris Schade-Bünsow, brought with him an important message. Messe Müchen, a major player in world exhibition industry, was seeking some collaboration in China to establish a new architecture award. Unsurprisingly, they would like this award to be somthing different, something that would put urban quality above building forms. Schade-Bünsow also mentioned that people were hopeful to invite Kristin Feireiss, the highly revered German curator and a former Pritzker juror, to chair the first jury. The award in question then is International Urban Project Award (IUPA) today. In 2019 and 2020, two editions have been held.

Setting up a new award is not over-ambitious in itself. But there are caveats. Challenges need to be addressed if a new award is to stay relevant in the long term. Two challenges stand out as the most obvious: (1) there is a de facto over supply of architecture awards around the world now; (2)traditional criteria by which we evaluate architecture works are getting more and more clumsy in adapting to the rapid changes in 21st century urban life.

The first challenge is relatively the easy one:it is indeed necessary for any new award to define some new problem, and vice versa. Everyone knows how contentious a subject architecture is today in daily public life. All media, professional or nonprofessional, has the potential of harvesting growth in audience through some architecture awards. It might be fair to say that in today's world, there are possibly more architecture awards than worthy projects. While mediocre awards fade soon, good awards do stay. Recently there are some new awards that have defined some genuinely new problems and are bound to remain: such as the one in China focusing on the deficient end of the architecture scene, the ugliest buildings award. Being optimistic rather than cynical, IUPA defines its focus as the demonstrable, positive impact of a building to its immediate urban context and urban life. There is a deliberate absence of wholesale social agendas, those pursued by some big architecture awards. There is also a deliberate fusion between architecture and urban design at the smaller scale, to differentiate IUPA from more established urban design awards such as the Veronica Rudge Green Prize. Based on what we have seen in the past two editions, IUPA is graduately and steadily depicting its persona with more and more details.

The second challenge however, is much more difficult. Architecture juries are usually comprise of curators, critics and architects. People that have been trained to assess the quality of works not by numbers and measurements but by opinions and debates. At a time when architecture was evaluated primarily as art, this worked well. But given the drastic global changes in technological,environmental and social life in the second decade of the 21st century, very few would be so foolhardy as to maintain that architecture is still an autonomous discipline of art. Architecture, the prime form of modi fication men bring to the surface of the planet,and the prime shaper of urban life, needs to be tested in the scope of crises human civilisation is facing today. So the question has become, can traditional architecture criticism prevail when the focus has shifted from architect the individual to the urban dwellers the mass? If traditional architecture award was judged by aesthetics, on what would new architecture awards taking social and urban issues as primary concerns, such as IUPA, be judged?How much by ethics? How much by aesthetics? Or probably even, how much by science?

As a juror served in both IUPA juries, I would say this question is still a haunting one. I guess that many fellow jurors would feel the same. While it is impossible to say how much ethics, aesthetics,or science make their way into IUPA criteria, it is possible to say what IUPA criteria is not.

It is not pure ethics. IUPA does not think that a dramatised ethical story guarantees good architecture. From time to time, we see architectural projects in remote places, telling a story of how architecture saves that part of the world. But there is a danger though that these architecture works,with all the good intentions, can still fail because the real life story can be bitterly different from the one the architect sees. We may go as far back as Egypt in the 1940s to witness the origin of such architecture.We may reach as close as contemporary rural China to find similar ones. What is right is not enough.Our cities need what works.

It is not pure science. IUPA is not in a hurry to join a new trend in architecture awards asking for spread sheets showing the carbon numbers of the candidate projects. We saw the cult in numbers at the turn of the 20th century and how disruptive it was in architecture. Yet it comes back a century later along with emerging technologies and new ways of measuring our world. There have been a few candidate projects in this edition of IUPA that advertise great numbers in energy saving and emission reduction. But they showed disinterest in human activities, even marginalising them, and were rejected in the jury.

And of course it is no longer pure aesthetics,not in the way it was. We are at least seeing the beginning of the end of self-referential architecture.We are excited to see that a new kind of architectural delight, built upon the very basic human pleasure of seeing other people enjoying themselves, and sharing this mutual enjoyment in the same place, emerging.The swimming pool high above the city and the intervening horizontal open public floors in the São Paulo mixed complex demonstrates the resilience and optimism of that particular community. The anamorphic atrium of the small library in New York maximises peoples' visual connection, making full use of the evolving technologies and the changing behaviour pattern inside a modern library where reading is no longer the sole purpose. The simple,tender artificial terrain connecting the reoccupied tanks in Shanghai gives sound interpretations of industrial reclamation, with hundreds of smiling family gatherings every weekend as the proof. These wonderful projects are unmistakably achieved through, and only through ingenious design.They signal to IUPA jurors some kind of new core of architecture, around which good stuff can be conceived and made. Is it human empathy? Or,simply a thoughtful return to common-sense?

Our thanks to Mr. Boris Shade-Bünsow, whose vision and rigour has made both the IUPA and this special number ofWApossible.