新加坡的新地标

It may sound odd but since the 1960s Singapore has been slowly remaking itself as a garden city. Tiny, dense, hyper-urban and constantly clawing back land from the sea to accommodate its booming centre, the city-state has nevertheless seen green tentacles creeping into every corner, every central reservation, every sliver of leftover sidewalk. Plants here thrive in the year-round tropical climate and grow in the most obscure places. The effect is impressive: a skyscraper city framed by palms and blooming bougainvilleas.

自60年代起，新加坡慢慢地将自身打造为一个花园城市——这种说法听起来或许有些怪异。在这个狭小、拥挤、高度城市化并且不断通过填海造田的城市国家，绿色的蔓藤爬满了每一个角落、中央绿化带乃至步行道的边边角角。得天独厚的热带雨林气候给绿色植物带来了勃勃生机，在人们最注意不到的地方也潜滋暗长。新加坡由此给人留下了这样的印象：棕榈树和花花草草环绕点缀下的一座摩天大厦林立的现代化都市。

But no matter how green the city is becoming, it has always been defined more by its architecture than its horticulture. Most recently, Marina Bay Sands, an unimaginably vast casino and hotel complex, has become the city’s de facto symbol. Desperate not to loose out to the urban hubs emerging in the Middle and Far East, Singapore set out to attract tourists by building the most expensive hotel the world has ever seen. At a cost of more than $5bn, it surpasses even the dripping gold of the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi.

但无论城市变得多么“绿色”，它终归是由建筑物、而非园艺来定义的。最近，集赌场与酒店于一身的综合建筑体滨海湾金沙酒店(Marina Bay Sands)成为新加坡实际意义上的象征。为了不逊色于中远东地区兴起的城市中心，新加坡通过建造世界上最华贵的酒店来吸引游客。这座酒店造价逾50亿美元，甚至超过了阿布扎比堆金砌玉的酋长宫殿酒店(Emirates Palace)。

The hotel is built on reclaimed land, across the bay from the city’s Central Business District, and operated by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. At 57-storeys high and with 2,561 guest-rooms, the structure straddles the city like a colossus. Singaporeans are discouraged from visiting by a S$100 (￡49) levy on entrance; tourists can enter for free. Despite this, the casino, along with another in nearby Sentosa, is set to surpass the whole of Vegas in revenue (though not Macao, which is in another league). Singapore – puritanical and strait-laced, with its abiding acceptance of law and order and its aversion to chewing gum – finds itself in an uncomfortable position: its most iconic building, the one which symbolises its skyline like no other, is its “IR”, or “Integrated Resort” (they can’t quite bear to call it a casino). And apart from its surfboard-shaped roof garden, it isn’t very green at all.

这座酒店建在填海而成的土地上，与新加坡中心商业区隔海相望，由拉斯维加斯金沙集团(Las Vegas Sands Corporation)经营管理。这座57层的酒店拥有2561间客房，好似与城市跨海湾相望的一座巨像。（外国）游客可以免费进入赌场，而新加坡本国人则需交纳100新元(约合49英镑)的“门票”，政府希望以此劝阻国民前来赌博。尽管如此，这家赌场加上另外一家位于附近圣淘沙(Sentosa)的赌场，合计收入将超过整个拉斯维加斯（但澳门的赌场不算，因为那是另一个故事）。向来以其清教徒式的拘谨、恪守法律和规则以及反感口香糖而著称的新加坡，发现自己的处境有些尴尬：它最具代表性的建筑物，最显眼的地标性建筑，被称为“IR”或曰“一体化度假村”（直接称之为赌场，新加坡人有些难以承受）。而除了冲浪板形状的屋顶花园之外，它还真算不上有多么“绿色”。

The city’s solution has been to counterbalance the casino by constructing a huge green Eden, the Gardens by the Bay project, which is due for completion next summer. Singapore’s answer to New York’s Central Park, the gardens comprise a green corona which will encircle the bay to create a ring of almost continuous green space at the centre of the expanded city, transplanting its heart from the crowded colonial centre with its familiar landmarks (Raffles, the old post office, now the Fullerton Hotel and the rest) to a new CBD. It has realised that towers, the ubiquitous signifier of commercial modernity, are not enough to make it distinctive, but this garden certainly is.

在这方面，新加坡的对策是修建一个巨大的绿色伊甸园，即滨海湾花园(Gardens by the Bay)项目，以此对赌场加以“制衡”。该项目预计将于明年夏季完工。作为纽约中央公园的“新加坡版”，新公园被设计成一个环绕滨海湾的绿色花冠，涵盖了扩张后的城区中心地带几乎没有间隔的绿色空间，将新加坡的中心从老城区拥挤的殖民风格的建筑群落区（包括老邮局所在地莱佛士(Raffles)，现在是Fullerton酒店，以及周边其他的建筑）迁移至此。新加坡意识到，作为现代商业标志物而无处不在的高层建筑，并不足以使自身与众不同，但这样一个花园却肯定可以。

Stand on top of the Integrated Resort (the best thing about it – you can’t see it from its own roof), look down and what catches your eye is not the city’s dense matrix of towers but a pair of seductively curvaceous greenhouses and a forest of diaphanous steel mushrooms. To a northern European, there is something desperately counterintuitive about building a greenhouse in the tropics but here they’ve been employed to introduce non-native species in a theatrical burst of colour largely absent from the rainforest greens of local vegetation. The structures are stunning. Designed by Wilkinson Eyre, an international architecture firm based in London, they look much like the inheritors of that very British tradition of glass houses which led to Crystal Palace and Kew’s Palm House.

站在这个“一体化度假村”的顶层（最有意思的是:你从屋顶看不到度假村本身）俯瞰，最吸引人眼球的不是城市密密麻麻的高层建筑，而是两座曲线优美的温室以及林立着的钢铁构架透明蘑菇顶“森林”。从一个北欧人的角度来看，在热带雨林地带建立温室，真是对直觉的莫大挑战。这些温室实际上用于培育雨林中无法生长的外来植物，通过这些植物增加本地没有的自然色调。这些建筑令人震撼。它们是由伦敦Wilkinson Eyre设计的，看起来继承了英国玻璃房的传统，让人想起英国的水晶宫(Crystal Palace)和皇家植物园(Kew’s Palm House)。

Vast roofs stretch into the distance with the lightness of a spider’s web. The larger, flatter greenhouse, the Flower Dome – open temporarily this weekend to host the World Orchid Festival – covers nearly 200,000 sq m, rises to 38m and creates an artificial world which resembles the 1960s sci-fi visions of lunar greenhouses. Its landscape embraces bulbous South American trees, huge succulents, African baobabs and vast fiery carpets of red and gold flowers. The other “biome” is taller, its structure like a wave of glass and contains a simulated mountain up which grows the greenery of a tropical forest. Its roof reaches 58m and it creates an extraordinary landmark, a crystal mountain in the city’s flat, watery centre.

巨大的屋顶一直延展到远方，带有一种蛛网一般的轻盈与灵动。那个规模更大、也更为平滑的温室被称之为“花穹”(Flower Dome)，最近因承办世界兰花节而对公众临时开放。花穹占地近20万平米，高38米，修造出一个类似上世纪60年代科幻版本的月球温室环境。温室中的景致包括球根状的南美树木，巨大的多汁植物，非洲猴面包树，以及由鲜红色和金色鲜花织成的巨大花毯。另外一个“生态穹顶”更高一些，结构就像是由玻璃组成的层层海浪，其中模拟了一座生长着绿色热带植物雨林的山脉。这间温室高达58米，成为了一个非同寻常的地标——被城市相对平缓的轮廓线衬托出的水晶山。

Wilkinson Eyre has made a successful habit of creating elegantly, and seemingly effortlessly, engineered structures that quickly come to define new or revived city centres. The firm’s “Winking Eye Bridge” over the Tyne has become a symbol of Newcastle’s regeneration; the 100-storey International Finance Centre in Guangzhou is one of the slickest skyscrapers of recent years; and the cable car in London’s Docklands (currently under construction) looks set to redefine this disconnected, desolate flatland.

Wilkinson Eyre养成了一种成功的习惯，即建造优雅、看似毫不费力的建筑物，而这些建筑物会迅速成为或者复活为城市中心的“名片”。该公司在泰恩河上修建的“眨眼桥”(Winking Eye Bridge)，已经成为纽卡斯尔市复兴的象征；在广州修建的高达100层的国际金融中心，是近年来最漂亮的摩天大楼；而伦敦城港区的缆车项目（目前在建）则将重新定义这一支离破碎、荒凉的平坦地带。

These greenhouses are the finest thing the firm has done. But they are not the only structures in the gardens. Equally prominent are the eccentric “Supertrees”. Designed by the gardens’ Bath-based landscape architects Grant Associates and London engineers Atelier One and Atelier Ten – in a curious echo of a colonial past this is a completely British project – the trees are a forest of steel armatures which rise between 25-50m, their structures composed of a complex, twiggy network of steel. They are designed to act as frames for climbing plants, creepers and “epiphytes” which clad the trees of the tropical rainforests.

这些温室是这家设计公司最杰出的作品。但它们并非花园中唯一的建筑物。同样抢眼的还有那些古怪的“超级树”(Supertrees)。它们的设计者是总部位于巴斯的景观设计所Grant Associates和伦敦设计机构Atelier One and Atelier Ten。作为对以往殖民地年代的巧妙回应，这是一个彻头彻尾的英式项目。“超级树”是一片25至50米高的钢铁支架丛林，由枝繁叶茂的繁复钢铁网络构成。之所以设计“超级树”，是为了给热带雨林里的攀援植物、匍匐植物和附生植物提供生长空间。

The guiding spirit behind the gardens is Dr Kiat W Tan. “We need to grab people’s attention,” he tells me, “and these structures are about creating a ‘wow factor’. Education is good, but without entertainment no one will pay attention.”

这些花园背后的灵魂人物是Kiat W Tan博士。“我们需要抓住人们的注意力，”他告诉我，“而这些建筑正是为了让人们发出惊讶声。教育是不错，但如果没有娱乐因素，就抓不住人们的注意力。”

Tan has high hopes for what the gardens might achieve. “They can teach civic manners – for example, how to use and inhabit public space. But they also create a sense of belonging. This is prime real estate in the Central Business District and yet people can feel they own a bit of it, and that this is their park. It counterbalances the casino, a paradise to its mammon with buildings that become condominiums for plants.”

Tan对这个花园将实现的东西抱有很高的期望。“它们可以起到教育民众的作用——比如说，如何使用公共空间。它们同时还能够产生一种归属感。虽然它是地处中央商务区的高档地产项目，但人们还是能产生一点拥有感——这是他们的公园。”

The gardens represent a huge civic investment – S$1bn spent on the greening of prime land – but the city is clear that it creates value. Just like Central Park, the plots around the gardens will become highly desirable, massively raising their value in an already expensive location.

公园代表着巨大的市政投入——在主体场地的绿化上花费了10亿新加坡元——但新加坡明白，这种做法能够创造价值。与纽约中央公园一样，花园周边的地产会变得非常抢手，并大幅推升本就不菲的地产价格。

The project is not, of course, only for Singaporeans. The city is already a magnet for tourists: its location serves as a genuinely cosmopolitan metropolis at the heart of Asia, which makes it popular with Chinese and Indians, as well as with Westerners looking for that touch of Asian exoticism minus its chaotic flipside. The gardens, with their delicate ecosystem of burgeoning tropical growth and carefully controlled spread, have become the perfect metaphor for this meticulously and intelligently-planned city. And what a nice touch that even the plants have been given megastructures and skyscrapers to allow them to compete with the city on equal terms.

当然，这个项目并非仅仅服务于新加坡人。这个城市国家已经成为一个旅游热点：它地处亚洲心脏地带，是一个真正的国际化大都会，颇受中国人和印度人的青睐，同时对那些想寻求一点亚洲风情、又想避开其混乱一面的欧洲游客也充满吸引力。这些拥有精巧生态环境的公园——那些热带植物既茁壮成长，其生长范围又受到小心翼翼的控制——已经成为这个规划精明而仔细的城市国家的最佳象征。而最打动人的地方在于，他们甚至为那些植物提供了可供生长的庞大建筑和摩天大厦，使其能够与这个城市平等地“竞争”。

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture correspondent

埃德温?希思科特(Edwin Heathcote)是英国《金融时报》建筑业记者