人如其食，屋如其工

张利/ZHANG Li

人如其食，屋如其工

You Are What You Eat, Your Building Is What It Is Made From

张利/ZHANG Li

在网络呈现最新信息的今天，世博会也许不再重要了。但本届米兰世博会还是提出了一个发人深省的话题：食物与人类的生存。在气候变化不可逆、人口膨胀加剧的现实面前，这一问题对文明的挑战是不言而喻的。

食物与建筑之间的共性在于，它们都强有力地参与构成或作用于人的身体。前者决定了我们身体基本构成单元的蛋白链结构，后者则不仅通过空间、也通过其构件的连接方式——工法，来记录或暗示对我们身体的回应。如果在此借用梅洛庞蒂的论断——我们的世界与我们的身体是同质的——那么食物的构成与建筑的工法之间就有了某种类比的可能。

关于食物决定我们身体的判断，当然最广为人知的就是“人如其食”了。历史上抵达这一简单的字面表达的路径并不简单。食物被长期认为仅仅是生存的必需品——因而是低层级的——所以并不能在决定人的本质方面起到多大的作用。1826年，布里拉-萨瓦兰在《关于口味的生理学——对美食的思考》中写道“告诉我你吃什么，我就能说出你是什么样的人”。1863-1864年，费厄巴赫在《关于精神主义与物质主义》中提出“人是由他吃的食物决定的”。这些19世纪的论断实际上都是基于生理上的观察，也没有任何在科学领域之外产生公众影响的图谋。把“人如其食”的概念变成脍炙人口的日常语言的是林德拉尔在1942年所著的《你即你所食：如何通过饮食获得健康》。这位医生的论点恰恰符合了当时中产阶级的个体意识的兴起，使对食物的关注开始具有了生理之外的社会意义。在随后1960年代的嬉皮士运动与1990年代的有机食物运动中，食物的问题开始变得愈发意识形态化，这一趋势一直延续至今。

至于“屋如其工”或者说建筑即是其材料与工法的这一直白的判断，其走过的道路也一点也不比前面的“人如其食”简单。在几乎所有前工业时期的建筑理论著作当中，材料与工法都被当做是最基本的物质技能——因而是形而下的——所以不会在决定建筑的品格上起到决定性的作用。在西方的维特鲁威及其在文艺复兴前后的所有复述者的文献中，几何、比例等知识性的内容显然被认为是更高级的。对我国的宋《营造法式》究竟是“施工标准”还是“结算标准”的讨论亦有类似之处。直至森佩尔在1861-1863年间的《技术与工艺的风格，抑或实用的美学》把材料与工法，或者说建筑的物质过程，直接提升到建筑美学的核心地位，“屋如其工”才逐渐为人们所认知。或许应当感激这位放逐的德国人在对现苏黎世高工建筑系所做的开创性工作，使“屋如其工”在20世纪的种种形而上思潮的冲击中至少有了一条不间断的线索。其下一个被多数人听到的关于“屋如其工”的声音是20世纪末的弗兰姆普敦的《工法文化研究：建造的诗学》，在这里，一个代表性的现代建筑评论家放下20世纪最典型的新马克思主义的“上层建筑”叙事，以犹抱琵琶半遮面的方式关注起工法这一建筑的“底层结构”问题。

有趣的是，在此次以“食”为题的米兰世博会上，其规划本身一开始似乎就在约束建筑过于形而上或浪漫主义的表达，以紧凑、严格的网格试图把每一个展馆的建筑师拉回到更“简单”、更“底层”的建筑问题的探讨，为“人如其食”的主题和“屋如其工”的表达之间建立了桥梁。本期《世界建筑》正是从这个角度来观察此次米兰世博会的建筑的，不论是对有机材料的刻意追求（中国馆、法国馆、爱沙尼亚馆），对基本建造细胞的累加（万科馆、英国馆），对“杂食性”材料与空间的引入（美国馆、巴西馆），还是对生物肌理的人工再造（意大利馆、巴林馆）等，都是令人感到饶有兴味的。□

At a time when the newest always comes from internet, the Expo is no longer as relevant as it used to be. That said, there is a very relevant question raised by the Expo Milano: food and the survival of the mankind. The climate is changing irreversibly. The world population is growing exponentially. The challenge of feeding the world has never been tougher.

One thing that is shared by food and architecture is that, they are all closely related to the human body. While food defines the protein structure of the building blocks of our bodies, architecture modulates and interacts with our bodies not only by space, but also by tectonics - ways in which materials are joined. If we borrow Merleau-Ponty's famous argument–the world is made by the same stuff as our bodies–then there is an analogical link between the composition of food and the tectonics of our buildings.

The best known phrase concerning food and the human body is of course "you are what you eat". Yet the route to such a phrase is much more difficult than its wording. Food has been long regarded as mere necessities for survival–therefore inferior–not to be expected to have any significant effect on character-building. One of the early notions concerning food and human body came from Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, in which he wrote "Tell me what you eat and I can tell what you are". In his 1863/64 book Concerning Spiritualism and Materialism, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach wrote "Man is what he eats". Although these 19th century quotes looked familiar enough to us, they didn't bear any meaning other than scientific ones. The vehicle of carrying the message to the mass is Victor H. Lindlahr's 1942 best seller You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet. Doctor Lindlahr's point coincided with the growing self-body-awareness of the middle class and started to be more than scientific. With the hippies of the 1960s and the organic movement of 1990s, the link between food and ourselves has become more and more ideological.

As for buildings and its tectonic, the point "your building is what it is made from" has taken a similar winding path. Almost all pre-industrial treatises treated tectonics as mere physical skills - therefore inferior - not to be expected to have serious effects on the character of the building. In the West, from Vitruvius to his re-iterators of the Renaissance and beyond, put knowledge of geometry and proportion above tectonics. Similar things happened in the East, where Ying Zao Fa Shi met with comparable fate. It was Gottfried Semper's Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik that gave architecture tectonics a worthy new look, a core position in architecture. Thanks to his founding work in what is ETH Architecture now, the notion on tectonics remained a continuous line in 20th century architecture, and survived all the dominating discourses on ideology, high art and cultural criticism. The next heard-by-the-mass voice came from the Kenneth Frampton, his Studies of Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction returned a decent role to tectonics which is at least as significant as all Neo-Marxism narratives, although reluctantly.

Interestingly, in this Expo Milano featuring food as the topic, the plan tried to limit all metaphysical or romantic expressions of buildings in the first place. A rigid, compact grid generates the pull to each architect, bringing them back to the simpler, more basic problems of architecture. It sets up a bridge between "you are what you eat" and "your building is what it is made from". It is of course, the exact subject of this issue of World Architecture.□

清华大学建筑学院/《世界建筑》

2015-12-06