英文演讲稿-关于建筑

There is a story of architecture through humanity, and about Beauty in simplicity and nature.

We are in the Arctic Circle, traveling towards the North Pole, across the frozen world. We are coming to celebrate an ancient, elemental and beautiful structure. But because of the temperature in the Arctic are rising faster than anywhere else, It’s a structure could soon be lost forever.

Today we will build an igloo together, a structure that reveals the origin of architecture, when man first created shelter from hostile weather and prowling beasts.

First we need a good snow.

Igloo, a creation of the Inuit culture, was used as winter home and shelters on hunting expeditions. The people there still hunt, but few build igloos.

Then we draw a big circle on the ground.

And blocks. The blocks are cut from snow, compacted by the wind to the right consistency. We need about fifty blocks in all.

The master block, the foundation has to be placed facing towards the sunshine, because the sun gives us everything. The blocks are laid in a clockwise direction, following the motion of the sun as it moves though the sky from draw to dusk.

The way it works is very simple. This particular sort of dome is like the top of an eggshell. It is a ovoid dome, not a semi-circle, so that the force of the weight of the blocks are taken more or less straight down to the ground. The trouble with these sorts of dome, they thrust outwards and want to sort of fall down, but the igloo is incredibly strong. And it supports its own weight, and a lot of other things besides when it’s completed.

The miracle of the igloo is that the weakest building material possible, frozen water, achieve strength through brilliant engineering.

After a couple of layers of blocks, the walls start sloping inward. The blocks start to spar up and each block is cunningly shaped. It’s all together by a good bit which sort of melts a bit of snow, and then that freezes. And it just stays firm. So it’s all being glued together with ice.

Constructing a dome without props or scaffolding is a perilous undertaking. The final stages are hazardous. Problematic joins are fixed with intricate ice carpentry. And the familiar shape keeps on growing.

Back inside, all that remains are the finishing touches. We spin two blocks of particular shape to be the keystone and capped stone. Finally it’s completed.

The dome is regarded as one of the high points of our architectural culture, particularly celebrated as a hallmark of roman engineering genius. Yet, in this culture, isolated, remote from our own, the dome also developed to meet particular environmental problems and demands. It’s incredible that two cultures so different should come up with the same architectural form.

The igloo is a wondrous machine. The snow blocks are cold but wonderful insulators. When heat melts the surface of snow, and the liquid would run into the cracks, freeze and seal them,. So the whole thing really becomes a building of ice rather than snow, eventually much stronger.

The igloo contains all the basic ideas of architecture. It’s a practical shelter and a miniature masterpiece of engineering. But above all, the igloo is beautiful, beautiful because of the logic, the clarity of thinking behind its design and construction, beautiful because it seems so simple, yet is also so complex in its function. And of course, beautiful because of its form, the celestial dome, the symbol of the sun in this icy land.