Pyongyang's Retro Sci-Fi Architecture
平壤的复古科幻建筑
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.
2015年7月，我们两人在刚投入使用的朝鲜平壤机场下了飞机。那是我们第一次来这个国家。作为在北京工作的建筑师，我们对世界上的城市和摩天大楼非常熟悉，但朝鲜在我们的脑海里就是一个黑点——和多数人一样，我们对它的印象充斥着先入之见和刻板印象，把这个所谓的“隐士王国”渲染得非黑即白。我们曾试图把这些想法抛却脑后，却未料到这第一次访问会给我们留下如此困惑的感觉，即真实而由衷之物的区别，已经被表面上的假装或伪造之物所模糊。
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.”
从离开那一刻起，我们就知道一定要再来。在接下来的四年里，我们在北京的高丽旅行社(Koryo Tours)的帮助下，又去了三次。随着时间的推移，我们决定尝试通过摄影表现平壤复杂的现实，最后便有了《模范城市——平壤》(Model City: Pyongyang)这本书。
电子工业馆是这座城市文化综合体的六座建筑之一。
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 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.
平壤是一个拥有320万人口的城市，有着悠久的历史，但朝鲜战争（朝鲜称为“美国战争”）后，新成立的政府进行了大规模的重建，旨在使其成为一种新社会的模范城市。朝鲜社会建立在主体思想(juche)基础上，这是一种基于自主原则的本土社会主义形式，它给城市注入了一切，尤其是建筑。1994年至2011年统治朝鲜的金正日在《论建筑》(On Architecture)一文中根据主体思想列出了有关轴线、高度控制、空间框架等方面的规则，在这座城市的任何地方都可以看到这些规则。
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.
但不同的建筑阶段在这座城市中仍显而易见：从早期激进的粗野主义，到现代主义和后现代主义，再到现任领导人金正恩治下的新发展，这一时期柔和的色彩和未来主义形状被应用于超级摩天大楼，形成一种复古的科幻风格。
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.
建筑师们一直梦想着这样的“整体规划”，所以我们不难爱上这座城市。我们想向世界展示它的美，一种不同的美，一种当必要的和不可避免的变化最终会发生时，需要保留下来的美。在过去的四年里，我们最初作为建筑师的迷恋慢慢地转变为感同身受——对一个有着如此强烈而独特的文化身份的城市，并且尤其是对它的人民，我们希望他们能有一个更好的未来。
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.
平壤溜冰场是仿照溜冰者的头盔设计建造的。
我们的摄影描绘了我们在朝鲜经历的令人困惑的“虚构现实”之感。我们的灵感来自朝鲜艺术中无处不在的一个特点：在绘画、雕塑和宣传海报中，天空被描绘成简单的渐变色，就像一出极度饱和的日落或日出，将现实转化为理想，隐喻着平壤本身的“乌托邦”。书中的建筑和城市景观采用了古典建筑的构图，没有进行大的编辑，而天空则完全被柔和的渐变色取代，色彩取自朝鲜艺术家用于海报、或建筑师用于外立面的配色。照片中两部分的对比创造了一种视觉上的并置，其中真实的部分（建筑或城市）看起来不真实，而不真实的部分（天空）实际上可能是真实的。
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.
当你决定去朝鲜，遵守规则是游戏的一部分。我们赢得了导游的信任，他们是我们唯一有机会接触的朝鲜人。这种信任不仅给了我们一定程度的拍摄和获取信息的自由，也让我们与他们建立了更亲密的人际关系，这样我们就可以谈论我们的生活和他们的生活，我们的现实和他们的现实。
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.
我们对一些互动感到惊讶。例如，他们中的一个问我们迈克尔·杰克逊(Michael Jackson)是否真的死了。2016年11月9日，我们在看不到新闻的朝鲜，而我们的导游——出人意料地——告诉了我们唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)当选的消息。我们见到了设计平壤新机场的建筑师（这让人感到意外，因为一些媒体报道称，由于金正恩不喜欢这个设计，建筑师已经遇害)，他在罗马学习过五年，我们发现他的意大利语说得很好。我们在一个未来主义风格的新住宅区一起吃了份泡菜披萨，最后在一家卡拉OK吧和导游唱了首古老的意大利反法西斯歌曲《啊，朋友再见》(Bella Ciao)。他们对歌词都熟记于心。
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.
书中几乎看不到平壤人的一面；在宏大的城市空间或巨大的雕像前，人只是小小的存在。但是如果你仔细看，人就在那里。所有这些朴素、干净、纪念碑式的城市建筑，都有隐蔽的休闲和娱乐空间，就像许多公园一样——平壤是亚洲数一数二的绿色城市之一——人们喜欢在其间野餐、唱歌和滑旱冰。举行阅兵和团体舞蹈的政治空间金日成广场面朝宁静的大同江，人们在这里带着孩子散步，享受午后的阳光。
来源：好英语网
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