Essay
At the Pier, Before the Last Ferry
末班渡船之前的码头
Sunday, half past eight, and the city is still deciding whether to be awake. I put the bike in the stairwell the night before so I could leave quietly. South, thirty kilometres, into a headwind the whole way. Nothing in my bag but a pencil case and a flask of coffee that goes cold by the second village.
The lake is not beautiful in November. It is grey and slightly too still, and the fog sits on it like something forgotten. There is a pier out there, rotting in the polite way that timber rots here, and a ferry sign that no longer means anything. I have been coming since I was a student, and the sign was already useless then.
Drawing Badly on Purpose
The sketch takes four minutes. The pier, the waterline, the smudge where the fog refuses to let the far shore be. It is a bad drawing. I do it on purpose: at the office I am the man who makes things precise, and here I am allowed to put down a line without defending it afterwards. Four minutes, then I close the book.
A four-minute drawing knows something a four-week model does not.
I sit for a while with the headphones on. A quartet from 1961 playing something unhurried — the drummer using brushes, the piano leaving more space than it fills. It is the same music I listened to at twenty-two, when I still believed buildings were objects rather than arguments. I am not sure which of those ideas is the more romantic one.
By eleven the fog is going. You can see how the shore actually lies, the water gets its colour back, and the pier looks worse — less mysterious, more simply old. I like that moment. It is the same one I wait for on a site, when the scaffolding comes down and a building has to stand there and be a building.
The Way Back
Home is thirty kilometres into the wind, which is to say, the same wind, turned around. I take the long route past the water tower for no reason I could defend to anyone. My legs are finished by the time I reach the city edge, and the ring road smells of hot asphalt and diesel in a way I somehow enjoy.
You can tell an architect's Sunday by how little he built and how well he looked.
At home I put the sketch on the desk next to the drawings that actually pay. There are eleven of them now, all the same pier, all bad. I do not know what they are for. I suspect that is exactly why I keep making them.
中文译文
周日早上八点半，整座城市还在犹豫要不要醒。前一晚我就把自行车放进了门厅，好让自己出门时没有声音。往南，三十公里，一路顶风。包里只有一只笔袋和一瓶咖啡，到第二个村子就凉了。
十一月的湖谈不上好看。灰，静得有些过分，雾趴在水面上，像一件被忘记的东西。远处有座码头，按这里木头特有的体面方式烂着，还有一块早已不作数的渡船牌。我做学生时就来这儿，那时候那块牌子就已经没用了。
故意画坏
速写只花四分钟。码头、水线、雾不肯让对岸显形的那团模糊。这是一张糟糕的画。我是故意的：在事务所里我是那个把一切做准的人，在这里我可以画一条线，之后不必为它辩护。四分钟，然后合上本子。
一张四分钟的速写，知道的东西比做四周的模型还多。
我戴着耳机坐了一会儿。一支一九六一年的四重奏，弹得不急不缓——鼓手用鼓刷，钢琴留出的空比填满的多。这是我二十二岁听的音乐，那时我还相信建筑是物件，而不是争论。我说不清哪个念头更浪漫。
到十一点，雾散了。你能看清岸线究竟怎么走，水拿回了自己的颜色，码头反而显得更糟——没那么神秘，只是旧。我喜欢这个时刻。在工地上我也等同一刻：脚手架撤掉，一栋楼必须站在那儿，做一栋楼。
回程
回程是三十公里顶风，也就是说，同一阵风，掉了个方向。我绕远路经过水塔，理由说不清，也懒得跟谁解释。骑到城边时腿已经废了，环路上一股热沥青和柴油的味道，我居然有点喜欢。
看一个建筑师怎么过周日，就看他建得多不多、看得好不好。
回到家，我把速写放到桌上，和那些真正付钱的图纸并排。现在有十一张了，全是同一座码头，全都很糟。我不知道它们有什么用。我猜，这正是我一直画下去的原因。
