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| NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — Renovating a historic building is rarely simple, whether it’s a Brooklyn brownstone or, in this case, the $120 million overhaul of Smith College’s century-old Neilson Library. As any architect can attest, a venerable building’s emotionally attached owners can be far more challenging to manage than the actual construction. But any reservations Maya Lin may have had after being hired in 2015 by Smith to redesign the 200,000-square-foot Neilson fell away as soon as she stepped through its front doors. With a laugh, she recalled her reaction at the time: “This is going to be easy, because this is so bad!” |
| 马萨诸塞州北安普敦市——翻修历史建筑很少是件简单的事，无论是布鲁克林的一幢褐石建筑，还是这次斥资1.2亿美元对史密斯学院(Smith College)拥有百年历史的尼尔森图书馆(Neilson Library)的翻修。任何一位建筑师都可以证明，处理好所有者对于珍贵建筑的感情依赖，可能比实际施工更具挑战性。但在2015年受雇于史密斯学院重新设计面积达20万平方英尺的尼尔森图书馆时，林璎(Maya Lin)可能有的所有顾虑在她踏进前门的那一刻就烟消云散了。她笑着回忆起当时的反应：“肯定很容易做，因为这状况太糟糕了！” |
| Three rounds of prior expansions to the library’s original 1909 structure — the centerpiece of the campus nestled near the Berkshires and designed in 1893 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief architect of Manhattan’s Central Park — had seen the Neilson morph into an eyesore. On a recent visit to the freshly remodeled library, Lin, 61, stood before its front steps and pointed to where hulking wings had been added to either side, effectively walling off the two halves of the school’s sweeping lawns. It was even worse inside. “They had put seven-and-a-half-foot-high mezzanines in,” she said as we entered. “You came in and you saw feet!” |
| 史密斯学院位于伯克希尔附近，由曼哈顿中央公园的首席建筑师弗里德里希·劳·奥姆斯泰德(Frederick Law Olmsted)于1893年设计。尼尔森图书馆始建于1909年，是校园的中心建筑。以原结构为基础，它此前曾进行三轮扩建，最终变得有碍观瞻。前不久，61岁的林璎参观了这座新改建好的图书馆，她站在门前的台阶上，指着两边原本添加了巨大侧翼的地方，学校广阔的草坪分为了两半。里面的情况原本更差。“他们建了七英尺半高的夹层，进门就能看见人的脚！”我们进门时她说。 |
| The mezzanines are now gone, as are the view-blocking wings, replaced by two smaller, recessed, window-filled expansions, thus restoring the Neilson’s 1909 facade to its original prominence. And Smith’s Special Collections, previously scattered across different campus locations, have now all been moved into one climate-controlled area. |
| 夹层现在已经消失了，阻碍视线的侧翼也消失了，取而代之的是两座较小的、嵌入式的、有很多玻璃窗的扩展部分，从而将尼尔森图书馆1909年的外立面恢复到原来的显要位置。而以前分散在校园不同地点的史密斯学院的特别馆藏(Special Collections)，现在都被移至一个室内气候经过控制的区域。 |
| With the Neilson’s renovation complete and its doors set to reopen to students on March 29, this should have been a moment of professional triumph for Lin in a practice that melds art and architecture, from the Museum of Chinese in America in downtown Manhattan to the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., back to her public debut, in 1981, with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose aesthetic force still gathers emotion-filled crowds in Washington, D.C. |
| 随着翻新的完成，尼尔森图书馆将于3月29日向学生重新开放，对林璎而言，这种将艺术与建筑融为一体的实践应是她职业生涯的胜利时刻，从曼哈顿市中心的美国华人博物馆(Museum of Chinese in America)到阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利郡的公民权利纪念碑(Civil Rights Memorial)，再追溯到她在1981年首次公开亮相的作品越南退伍军人纪念碑(Vietnam Veterans Memorial)，其美学力量仍能在华盛顿特区聚集起心潮澎湃的人群。 |
| Yet Lin was in no mood for a victory lap. On Jan. 25, her husband of nearly 25 years, Daniel Wolf, had died of a sudden heart attack. The couple and their two daughters, India, 23, and Rachel, 21, had all been together at their home in rural Colorado. “Nobody expected it,” Lin said. “It just was one of those things that literally came out of the blue. And we’re all like” — she dropped her voice to a stunned whisper — “what?” |
| 但林璎并没有心情庆祝胜利。1月25日，她结婚近25年的丈夫丹尼尔·沃尔夫(Daniel Wolf)突发心脏病去世。这对夫妇和两个女儿——23岁英迪亚(India)的和21岁的蕾切尔(Rachel)——一直生活在他们位于科罗拉多州乡村的家中。“没有人料到，”林璎说。“这就是那种突如其来的意外。我们都觉得，”她压低声音，发出惊愕地低语，“怎么会这样？” |
| Wolf was 65, a quiet — albeit deeply influential — force in the photography world, beginning as a dealer in the ’70s, assembling what is arguably the finest collection of photography in the world for the J. Paul Getty Museum, and as a collector in his own right whose personal holdings have put curators in swoons. Ten of his 19th-century daguerreotypes were lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an exhibition spotlighting the cityscapes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey — a symmetry which Lin said particularly delighted her husband. He’d launched his career in 1976 by hauling a suitcase of photos to the sidewalk in front of the Met and hawking vintage prints to passers-by. |
| 沃尔夫享年65岁，是摄影界一个低调（但影响力很大）的存在，他在上世纪70年代作为交易商起步，为J·保罗·盖蒂博物馆(J. Paul Getty Museum)甄选了堪称世界顶级的摄影藏品。作为收藏家，他的私人藏品也让策展人目瞪口呆。大都会艺术博物馆(Metropolitan Museum of Art)举办约瑟夫·菲利伯特·吉罗·德·普兰吉(Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey)的城市风光摄影展览，他借出了10张19世纪银版照片，林璎说，这种交相辉映让她的丈夫特别高兴。1976年，他正式入行，在大都会博物馆门前的人行道上拖着一手提箱照片，向路人兜售早期原作照片。 |
| The Giraults are just a fraction of a now-sprawling collection which fills the former Yonkers City Jail, bought by Lin and Wolf and transformed into an archive and private exhibition space. A staff is still busy cataloging and documenting all those photos — they could hardly catch up as Wolf kept arriving with new acquisitions he’d squirreled away over the years in storage units around New York. One jail cell — its bars still in place — is filled with nothing but prewar albums of intimately personal photography bought decades ago at Paris flea markets; another contains mammoth plates of the 19th-century American West taken by Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson. |
| 吉罗作品如今只是他众多藏品的一小部分，这些藏品塞满老扬克斯城监狱(Yonkers City Jail)，这里被林璎和沃尔夫买下，改造成了档案馆和私人展览空间。工作人员还在忙着整理和记录所有照片，几乎追不上沃尔夫补充新品的速度，这些年来，他一直把它们存放于纽约各地的仓库里。其中一间牢房（铁栏仍保持原样）放满了几十年前在巴黎的跳蚤市场买下的战前私人影集；另一间则放有卡尔顿·沃特金斯(Carleton Watkins)和威廉·亨利·杰克逊(William Henry Jackson)拍摄的关于19世纪美国西部的巨型感光板。 |
| “Every day he was like a kid in a candy store, he’d unearth something that he’d forgotten about,” said Lin. The organizing of that artwork continues, as does Lin’s own. With her “Ghost Forest,” an installation dramatizing climate change, set to open in New York City’s Madison Square Park in May, she said she had decided to return to the Northeast and dive back into her work. Yet surely no one would begrudge her a longer period of private bereavement? |
| “每天他都像个置身糖果店的孩子，发现一些他已经忘记的东西，”林璎说。这些艺术品的整理工作仍在继续，林璎自己的事业也是如此。“鬼魅森林”(Ghost Forest)是她创作的强调气候变化的装置作品，将于5月在纽约市麦迪逊广场公园展出，林璎说她已经决定返回东北部，重新投入工作。可是，肯定没人会舍不得给她更多抚平丧亲之痛的私人时间吧？ |
| “I gave myself three weeks with the kids without anything else,” she explained, thinking it would be therapeutic to then become busy. To ease the transition, her daughters had traveled with her from Colorado to their New York City home; Rachel had driven up with her to Smith that day. Not that Lin wasn’t having second thoughts about this sudden re-immersion into public life. “It’s hard to be back,” she added with a slight quiver in her voice. “It’s just really hard right now.” |
| “我给了自己三周时间，只和孩子们在一起，什么也不做，”她解释道，并且认为接下来的忙碌会起到治愈效果。为了缓解哀伤，女儿们和她一起从科罗拉多回到了纽约市的家；那天是蕾切尔开车陪她一起去了史密斯学院。对于这样突然地重新进入公共生活，林璎并不是没有犹豫。“回来真不容易，”她补充说，声音有些颤抖。“只是现在真的很艰难。” |
| These are difficult days for Smith College, as well. The pandemic shut down its campus and moved its classes online. Campus workers were furloughed and austerity measures levied on faculty members. Although some students have returned to live in the dorms this spring, campus life beyond Zoom classes seems hollowed out. |
| 这段日子对史密斯学院来说也很艰难。疫情导致校园封锁，课堂转移到了线上。校园工作人员被迫休假，教职员工也被迫接受紧缩政策。虽然今年春天有些学生回到了宿舍，但Zoom课堂以外的校园生活似乎被掏空了。 |
| Also remaining are painful reverberations from a 2018 campus incident involving the intersection of race and class, as reported by The New York Times last month. A student said she was racially profiled while eating in a closed-off dorm lounge; an outside investigation found no evidence of bias. But feelings and recriminations among faculty, students and staff remain raw. Accordingly, Smith’s president, Kathleen McCartney, was thrilled to have the new Neilson Library as something the entire school could rally around. “I think the grand opening is just going to lift everyone’s spirits,” McCartney said. |
| 正如《纽约时报》上个月的报道，2018年发生的一起同时涉及种族和阶级的校园事件也留下了痛苦的回响。一名学生说，她在封闭的宿舍休息室吃饭时遭遇种族性的描述；一项外部调查没有发现存在任何偏见的证据。但教职员工、学生和校园员工对彼此的不满情绪和互相指责仍未消除。因此，史密斯学院院长凯瑟琳·麦卡特尼(Kathleen McCartney)对于新落成的尼尔森图书馆感到十分兴奋，希望它能将整个学校团结起来。“我相信盛大的开幕式将让每个人精神振奋起来，”麦卡特尼说。 |
| Lin appeared equally buoyed by touring the library. She led the way to a rooftop terrace which offered stirring views of the surrounding mountains, pointing out meaningful details along the way. Large upper-floor windows that were near treetops had been laced with an ultraviolet webbing pattern — invisible to human eyes, but not to flying birds that might otherwise crash into the clear glass. Bird-watchers had a comfy nesting spot too, with many of the window frames large enough to climb into. “People are going to be sleeping in here,” Lin said with a chuckle, flashing back on her own long days — and longer nights — studying at Yale, where, as a 21-year-old senior, she beat out 1,420 competing proposals for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “I know because I was one of those people.” |
| 林璎似乎也对参观图书馆感到振奋。她带路来到一个可以观赏周围群山动人景致的屋顶露台，还一路指出具有意义的细节。楼上靠近树梢的巨大窗户上布有紫外线网格，人类肉眼看不见，但飞鸟却可以，这样一来它们就不会撞上透明玻璃。观鸟者也有一个舒适窝，因为许多窗框够大，人可以爬进去。“人们会在这里睡觉的，”林璎笑着说，回忆起自己在耶鲁大学读书时度过的漫长白天（和更漫长的夜晚），21岁的她还在读大四，就在越南退伍军人纪念碑的竞标中击败了1420个设计方案。“我知道会这样，因为我就是他们中的一员。” |
| Most importantly, ink-and-paper books still line the walls and fill the basement’s stacks. There may be an in-house cafe, communal spaces, and all the latest digital tools wired throughout the building, but these features coexist with quiet spots for solitary scholarship. Indeed, the new Special Collections area offers 40,000 linear feet of archival material. It includes the Mortimer Rare Book Collection’s hand-corrected drafts of novels by Virginia Woolf and poems by Sylvia Plath, as well as the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, which encompasses the personal papers of activists from Emma Goldman to Gloria Steinem, alongside those of less prominent but equally vital figures like Joan E. Biren, who began indelibly photographing the private lives of lesbians in the 1970s. |
| 最重要的是，纸质书仍摆放在墙壁上，填满了地下室的书架。可能会有一个室内咖啡馆、各种公共空间，还有全馆配备的最新数字工具，但它们不会与独自学习的安静场相冲突。事实上，新建的特别馆藏区提供了长度达4万英尺的档案材料。其中有《莫蒂默珍藏书集》(Mortimer Rare Book Collection)里弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫(Virginia Woolf)小说和希薇亚·普拉斯(Sylvia Plath)诗歌的手写改稿，还有《索菲亚史密斯女性史全集》(Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History)，包含了从爱玛·戈德曼(Emma Goldman)到洛丽亚·斯泰纳姆(Gloria Steinem)等活动人士的个人函件，还有一些没那么知名但同样重要的人物，比如琼·E·比伦(Joan E. Biren)，她在上世纪70年代拍下了讲述女同性恋私生活的不朽作品。 |
| “Even though there are newer ways in which they’re going to be teaching through the collections here, you’re still in a house of books,” Lin insisted. “Ultimately, a library has to be about reading. I don’t read on an iPad and I never will. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m a dinosaur. But I still feel the beauty of a book, I still believe in that beauty.” |
| “即使他们有更新的方式利用这里的藏书进行教学，你仍然身处一个书屋，”林璎坚称。“说到底，图书馆必须是以阅读为中心的。我不会在iPad上阅读，永远都不会。也许我错了，也许我是恐龙。但我仍然能感受到书籍的美，我仍然相信那种美。” |
| Sitting for a moment in an otherwise empty meeting room, Lin was asked again why this Neilson project felt so pressing, why she’d left Colorado so soon. After all, her architect partner, William Bialosky, as well as the design firm Shepley Bulfinch she was collaborating with, could surely oversee any final tweaks. |
| 林璎在空荡荡的会客室坐了一会儿，她又被问到为什么对尼尔森图书馆项目如此有紧迫感，为什么她这么快就离开了科罗拉多。毕竟，她的建筑师合作伙伴威廉·比亚洛斯基(William Bialosky)，以及与她合作的希普利·布芬奇(Shepley Bulfinch)设计公司肯定能监督好任何最终调整。 |
| “I owe my existence to Smith,” she answered bluntly. “I owe them everything.” |
| “我的存在归功于史密斯学院，”她直截了当地回答道。“我的一切都归功于这里。” |
| She related the story of her mother, Julia Lin, who was attending college in Shanghai in May 1949 as Mao Zedong’s Communist army besieged the city. The day Mao’s forces marched into Shanghai, Julia received a scholarship to transfer to Smith in the fall — if she could get there. That August, with two $10 bills and her acceptance letter sewn inside a dress collar, her father had her smuggled out of the country on a fishing boat, even as bombs were falling overhead and pirates cruised the harbor looking to rob seaborne escapees. It took a month for her to finally make it through Nationalist Army lines, sail south to Hong Kong, and eventually arrive here in Northampton. But once on campus, Lin said, her mother thrived, graduating in 1951 and then going on to earn a Ph.D. in Chinese language and literature at the University of Washington. There she met and married a fellow Chinese refugee grad student. Both became professors at Ohio University. |
| 她讲述了母亲张朝晖的故事。1949年5月，当毛泽东的共产党军队包围上海的时候，张朝晖还在那里上大学。毛泽东的军队进城那天，她获得了奖学金，如果能赶到，她可以在秋天转学到史密斯学院。那年8月，她父亲让人用渔船把衣领里缝着两张10美元钞票和录取通知书的她偷渡出国，炸弹从头顶落下，海盗在港口出没，企图抢劫海上的逃亡者。她用了一个月时间才通过了国民党军队的战线，向南抵达香港，最终来到北安普敦。林璎说，她母亲入学之后表现优异，于1951年毕业，随后继续在华盛顿大学(University of Washington)获得了汉语言文学博士学位。在那里，她遇到了一位逃难的中国研究生，并嫁给了他。两人后来双双成为俄亥俄大学(Ohio University)的教授。 |
| “If she had not gotten that scholarship to go to Smith, she wouldn’t have gotten out of China,” Lin continued, “which meant she wouldn’t have met my dad. Poof! In an instant, I don’t exist.” She recalled accompanying her mother to an alumni reunion at Smith in 1993, where she herself received an honorary doctorate. “She was just beaming. My mom passed away in 2013, and I just really wish she were alive to see this now.” |
| “如果她没有拿到奖学金，没有去史密斯学院，她就不可能离开中国，”林璎继续说，“也就不可能见到我爸爸。噗！我瞬间就不存在了。”她回忆起1993年陪母亲参加史密斯学院的校友聚会时，她自己也获得了荣誉博士学位。“她简直开心得不行。我妈妈在2013年过世，我真希望她能活着看到这一幕。” |
| She trailed off and then added, “You rarely get to bring it home in architecture, when a project and a client is so connected to your life story.” As Lin walked off, she extended her arm with an open palm; her daughter Rachel seamlessly slid her own hand into her mother’s, all without missing a beat. |
| 她停顿了一会儿，又继续说，“在建筑领域，当一个项目和一个客户与你的人生故事如此紧密的交织在一起时，拿下它是很难的。”林璎走的时候，伸出手臂，张开手心；女儿蕾切尔立刻用手握住母亲的手，完美跟上了节拍。 |
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