Предтекстовые упражнения

1. а) Вспомните, какие русские слова имеют те же корни, что и следующие английские слова:

modern, fact, organism, symptom, analyze, stereotype, dictate, functions, contrast, horizontal, activities, vertical, topography, formulate, risk, focus, despotic, typical, parade, soldiers, automatically, standard, result, ignore.

б) Посмотрите, в каких случаях при переводе лучше использовать русский синоним (Например: focus — фокус или центр).

2. Укажите, какие из данных слов являются прилагатель­ными и какие существительными.

matter, later, soldier, power, longer, quarter, planner, older, builder.

3. Прочтите текст. Укажите, какие четыре вопроса рассматриваются в нем. Определите часть речи выде­ленных слов.

T e x t. Historic City Forms

(1) Any community consists of examples of architecture— good, bad and indifferent—but in another sense the commu­nity itself is architecture. The planning of communities is the noblest form of architectural planning, and in giving form to towns or regions the planner is making what is per­haps his most valuable and significant contribution to human living.

(2) A true community is a living organism; it grows and changes, and its change is a symptom of its life. Setting too hard-and-fast a limitation on change by creating too rigid a pattern is harmful rather than helpful, and many a city lives a difficult existence because its life and its activities no longer fit the form its early planners imposed.

(3) In Europe and in the original settlements of North and South America the modern city grew up around an older core, and down to our own days these cores have continued to have a powerful influence on new plans even in the laying out of entirely new quarters. Certain urban lay-outs which have been repeated automatically are still looked upon as standard forms; actually, however, they represented orig­inally a direct adaptation to social, economic, and political conditions that no longer control. One of the reasons for analyzing both the city's medieval and its Baroque (or so-called Renaissance) heritage is to free the mind from these obsolete stereotypes.

(4) The medieval town was a combination of camp, mar­ket, and sanctuary. The necessity for protection colored all its institutions, dictated the use of a defensive site on hill­side or waterside and led to the erection of walls separating the town from the country and allowing access only through guarded gates. The social functions of the medieval town were concentrated in a square. Medieval builders, in their handling of space and their bold contrasting of horizontal and vertical, still have something to teach the twentieth-century architect who knows no way of achieving height except by erecting skyscrapers.

(5) The Baroque city was formulated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was actually built in the seven­teenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Baroque plan the old medieval market square is transformed into the traffic circle which the pedestrian crosses at a great risk. The focus of this plan is no longer the church but the palace, the seat of a one-sided, despotic power. In contrast with the medie­val town, the Baroque city demands flat sites, straight continuous streets, and uniform building and roof lines. It was built for armies and wheeled vehicles. The typical Baroque form might be called the parade city: not only its soldiers but also its citizens and its buildings are on parade. Whatever is visible must submit to this geometry; the city is organized for show.

(b) The Baroque plan, unlike the medieval, left a deep imprint on later generations; it became standard throughout Western civilization. That imprint showed itself in a prefer­ence for straight streets over curved ones, no matter what the expense or the inconvenience that resulted from ignoring the topography.