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  3. Passage Three (1) Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker Prizewinning Dutch archite

Passage Three (1) Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker Prizewinning Dutch archite

游客2024-11-03  20
问题     Passage Three
    (1)  Rem Koolhaas, the Pritzker Prizewinning Dutch architect, author and academic, has long had a beef with airports. It’s not the same beef that everyone else has with airports—the Cinnabon smell, the brusqueness of security, the $7 snack.  Koolhaas’ beef with airports is that they’ve lost their sense of purpose.
    (2)   " Airports used to be highly rationalized spaces that simply served to take you efficiently from one place to the plane," Koolhaas says. The process, in his mind, used to be very logical. "Arrivals, luggage, customs, blah blah blah. " But airports now are made up of what he has named junk space.  "You are basically almost forced to enter the bowels of a mostly financial configuration in order to be exposed to the maximum amount of shopping," he says. The serpentine (蜿蜒的) layout that herds passengers through a mazelike mall creates almost a "permanent sense of crowding," he notes, "with much less freedom to make our own choices and to maintain our own distances. "
    (3)  Airports are just one among the many, many public spaces that may have to be rethought, reorganized and redesigned in the era of pandemics, and Koolhaas believes it is way overdue. Also on his back-to-the-drawing-board list: cities, especially those that have no purpose but to attract people. "The problem is that in the last 20 or 30 years, cities have become gathering spaces for relatively affluent people and for tourists," he says. "There has been a kind of really drastic transformation of the point of cities, that we didn’t really pay enough attention to. "
    (4)  The architect who rose to fame largely for a book, Delirious New York, that celebrated New York City for its density and crowdedness has now turned his attention to less inhabited spaces, especially the countryside. To him, the gathering of more than 50% of the world’s population into metropoles that occupy just 2% of the world’s land mass was a problem long before anybody knew what the phrase social distancing meant.
    (5)  Because of the pandemic, people in cities began to wish they lived somewhere emptier and to suddenly wonder where their food came from. Koolhaas manages, just, to refrain from gloating. "I think that it’s simply slightly reinforcing the argument that it’s incredibly important to begin to look not necessarily away from cities but at the neglect of the countryside. "
    (6)  One of the overlooked roles open spaces often play, he notes, is as locations for vast, highly automated factories, data operations and fulfillment centers for companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google. And as online ordering and virtual meetings become life-protecting necessities, these behemoth structures have become ever more important.
    (7)  Even before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, Koolhaas was calling for architects to take on their design. "Our entire profession is geared toward the values and demands and needs of human beings," he said back in February at his exhibition opening.
    (8)   "But all over the world, these huge mechanical entities are now appearing. They are typically enormous, typically rectangular(长方形的), typically hermetic. " They also, occasionally, share space with humans. "We need to conceive of architecture that accommodates machines and robots, maybe as a priority," Koolhaas says.   "And that then investigates how robots and human rights might coexist in a single building. "
    (9)  At 75, Koolhaas is old enough to remember the difficulties and privations of the post-World War II years in Europe. Having spent some of his childhood in Indonesia, he’s also familiar with the havoc communicable diseases can play on a health system that is not prepared. So some of the new realities of life under a pandemic are reminiscent of his younger years.  Others, he is struggling with.
    (10)  Creativity, he says, is impossible in complete solitude. These days, Koolhaas spends about half his time on the building part of his practice, known as OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), and half of it on the research and theory part of his practice, which puts together books and exhibitions. For both those approaches, he needs other people.
    (11)   "In terms of work and working without human interaction, it is very, very noticeable to me that for creativity, interaction is key," he says, before offering up one of the syntactically complicated sayings for which he has become known. "For anything that will be necessary to create an exception, or a moment of genuine inspiration, human intercourse is necessary. "
    (12)  If there is a theme to Koolhaas’ body of work, it is this: he’s drawn to that which he feels has been given insufficient attention by his peers, whether it’s a point of view, a building material, the retail experience or a city in Nigeria. " I basically tried to put on the agenda issues and aspects that I felt were being ignored," he says of his career. A project in his hometown of Rotterdam is designed so the best view is from passing cars. A museum in Moscow’s Gorky Park is an abandoned restaurant clad in lowly polycarbonate plastic.
    (13)  While Koolhaas may have foreseen some of the challenges and shortcomings that the pandemic has accentuated, he was caught by surprise by the lack of the preparedness of Western nations. He’s also taken aback, but this time pleasantly, at "the incredible flexibility that people have shown in terms of changing their behavior in the most radical way. "
    (14)  Architects are both students and catalysts of human behavior; they want to understand it and to change it. Koolhaas has lost some of his faith that architecture alone can solve problems. "But I do believe," he says, " and I’ve had the luck of experiencing in person, that sometimes you get to combine a number of demands and a number of needs, in a particular context, in a way that creates an event that is deeply satisfying for quite a long time. " In other words, sometimes Koolhaas’ crazy schemes have worked, and that is enough. [br] By mentioning the book Delirious New York, the author intends to show that Koolhaas________.
选项 A、has switched his focus gradually
B、got his fame for studying cities
C、begins to look away from cities
D、knows more about social distance
答案 A
解析 推断题。根据斜体部分的专有名词定位至第四段。该段第一句指出，这位建筑师原是因为一本名为《疯狂纽约》的书而声名鹊起，这本书高度赞美纽约的密度和拥挤，而现在他却将注意力转向了人口较少的地方，尤其是乡村。随后一句说，现在对他来说，世界上50％以上的人口聚集到仅占世界陆地面积2％的大都市，已经成了一个问题。可见从出这本书到现在，作者的关注点发生了变化，故[A]为正确答案。
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