2011年考研英语二阅读 Text 3 原文翻译及答案解析

We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of prosperity and growth, with soldiers returning 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几十年是一个繁荣和增长的时期，数以百万计的士兵返回家园，凭借《退伍军人权利法案》上大学，并在婚姻登记处排队结婚。

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 learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

但说到住房，那是一个崇尚常识和相信少即是多的时期。在大萧条和战争期间，美国人学会了节俭生活，这种克制与战后对未来的信心相结合，使得小型、高效的住房变得非常时尚。

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 II 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.

经济状况只是推动高效生活趋势的一个刺激因素。“少即是多”这句话实际上最早由德国建筑师路德维希·密斯·凡德罗推广，他与其他与包豪斯设计学院相关的人一样，在二战前移民美国，并在美国建筑学院任职。这些设计师对美国建筑的发展产生了巨大影响，但没有谁比密斯的影响更大。

Mies's signature phrase means that less decoration, properly organized, has more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern 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.

密斯的标志性短语意味着，少一些装饰，组织得当，比大量装饰更有冲击力。他认为优雅并非源于丰盛。像其他现代建筑师一样，他使用了金属、玻璃和层压木材——这些材料今天我们认为理所当然，但在20世纪40年代象征着未来。密斯精致的呈现掩盖了这样一个事实：他设计的空间是小而高效的，而不是大而常空旷的。

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 city's 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 of the abstract art so popular at the time.

例如，密斯在芝加哥湖滨大道上建造的优雅塔楼中的公寓，比该市黄金海岸沿线较老邻居的公寓更小——两居室单元不到1,000平方英尺。但它们很受欢迎，因为它们通透的玻璃墙、所提供的视野以及建筑细节和比例的优雅，这相当于当时非常流行的抽象艺术在建筑上的体现。

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.

趋向“少”的趋势并非完全外来。在20世纪30年代，弗兰克·劳埃德·赖特开始建造更简约和高效的房屋——通常约1,200平方英尺——比他19世纪90年代和20世纪初设计的铺张的两层房屋更简约。

The "Case Study Houses" commissioned from talented modern architects by California Arts & 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

1945年至1962年间，由《加州艺术与建筑》杂志委托才华横溢的现代建筑师设计的“案例研究住宅”是“少即是多”趋势的又一本土影响。美学效果来自景观、新材料和坦率的细节处理。在他的案例研究住宅中，拉尔夫·拉普森可能错误预测了机械革命会如何影响日常生活——很少有美国家庭拥有直升机，尽管大多数最终

— but his belief that self-sufficiency was both desirable and inevitable was widely shared.

——但他关于自给自足既可取又不可避免的信念被广泛认同。

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