2011硕士研究生英语二Text3

       We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of prosperity and growth, with soldiers retuming home by the millions,going off to college on the G. I Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus.

我们倾向于认为二战后的10年是一个繁荣和增长的时期，上百万的士兵返回家中，根据退伍军人法案去上大学，排队登记结婚。

 But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less could truly be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had leamed to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

但是当说到他们的住房，当时的人民普遍认为少既是多，在萧条和战争期间，美国人学会了简单生活，再结合战后对未来的信心，使小型、高效实用的住房变得很流行。

Economic condition was only a stimulus for the trend toward efficient living， The phrase"less is more was actually first popularized by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus, a school of design, emigrated to the United States before World War I and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so than Mies.

经济条件只是高效生活趋势的一个刺激因素，少即是多其实最开始是由德国建筑工程师Ludwig Mies van der Rohe推广开来。与Bauhau设计学校的其他人一样，他在二战前移民美国，在多所美国设计学校任职。这些人对美国的建筑学产生了巨大的影响，但是没人能超过Mies.

Mies's signature phrase means that less decoration, properly organized, more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance Like other modem architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood-materials that we take for granted today but that in the 1940s symbolized the future. Mies's sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty。

密斯的口头禅就是：少装饰，适当的组织更有效果，高雅，他认为与其他现代建筑师不同。他使用了金属，玻璃和双层木质材料，这些在今天认为是理所当然，但在1940年是相当超前的。密斯的精妙的表现掩盖了房子小而高效的事实，而不是大而空虚。

The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller-two-bedroom units under 1, 000 square feet-than those in their older neighbors along the citys Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings'details and proportions, the architectural equivalent abstract art so popular at the time。

举例说明，Mie建造在芝加哥湖岸大道旁优雅大厦里的公寓比沿着城市黄金海岸老建筑中的公寓还要小-不足1000平方英尺的两居室。它们流行主要是应为他们的空气玻璃墙，能提供的景色，优雅的建筑细节和比例，在当时这种抽象的建筑风格非常流行。

The trend toward"less was not entirely foreign. In the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright started building more modest and efficient houses-usually around 1, 200 square feet-than the spreading two-story ones he had designed in the 1890s and the early 20th century.

更少的趋势并不是完全陌生，在20世纪30年代，Frank Lloyd Wright 开始建造比他在19世纪90年建造的2层楼更舒适，高效的房子，通常大约在1200平方英尺，

The Case Study Houses"commissioned from talented modern architects by California Arts &e Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1962 were yet another homegrown influence on the "less is more"trend. Aesthetic effect came from the landscape, new materials and forthright detailing. In his Case Study House Ralph Rapson may have mispredicted just how the mechanical revolution would impact everyday life--few American families acquired helicopters, though most eventually got clothes dryers--but his belief that self-sufficiency was both desirable and inevitable was widely shared。

       1945年至1962年，《加州艺术与建筑》杂志委托有才华的现代建筑师设计的“案例研究住宅”，是对“少即是多”趋势的另一个本土影响。美学效果来自于景观、新材料和明快的细节。在拉尔夫·雷普森的案例研究中，他可能错误地预测了机械革命将如何影响日常生活——很少有美国家庭购买了直升机，尽管大多数家庭最终都买了烘干机——但他认为自给自足是人们所希望的，也是不可避免的，这一观点得到了广泛认同。