New downtowns sprout towers that are almost always made of concrete and steel and covered in glass. 高塔在市中心拔地而起，但却几乎全是有着被玻璃覆盖表面的钢筋混凝土。

You can look at skylines all over the world -- Houston, Guangzhou, Frankfurt 看看世界各地的城市天际线吧--休斯顿，广州，法兰克福，

and you see the same army of high-gloss robots marching over the horizon. 你会看见那些一模一样的高抛光机器人大军正在水平面上前行。

Now, just think of everything we lose when architects stop using the full range of available materials. 现在，让我们想想当建筑师们不再使用那么多可用的材料时，我们将失去的一切。

When we reject granite and limestone and sandstone and wood and copper and terra-cotta and brick and wattle and plaster, 当我们抛弃了花岗岩、石灰岩、砂岩、木材、铜片、陶瓦、砖、篱枝或是石膏，

we simplify architecture and we impoverish cities. 我们简化了这些建筑，我们抛光了整个城市。

It's as if you reduced all of the world's cuisines down to airline food. 这就好比把世界各地的美食简化成飞机餐。

Chicken or pasta? But worse still,  鸡肉和通心粉二选一？但是更槽糕的是，

assemblies of glass towers like this one in Moscow suggest a disdain for the civic and communal aspects of urban living. Right? 那些像是在莫斯科的这种玻璃高楼的组合，其实暗含着一种对于城市社会生活的歧视。对吧？

Buildings like these are intended to enrich their owners and tenants, 像这样的建筑都成为了招揽开发商或是入驻公司的手段，

but not necessarily the lives of the rest of us, those of us who navigate the spaces between the buildings. 而它们对于每天穿行其中的我们来说却没有太多存在的意义。

And we expect to do so for free. 而我们正在自觉接受这样免费的存在。

Shiny towers are an invasive species and they are choking our cities and killing off public space. 亮晶晶的高塔是一种入侵物种，而它们的存在窒息了我们的城市，也碾压了我们的公共空间。

We tend to think of a facade as being like makeup, 我们趋向于把建筑的外表当作被粉饰的门面，

a decorative layer applied at the end to a building that's effectively complete. 最后附上的装饰层，会让建筑看起来很完整。

But just because a facade is superficial doesn't mean it's not also deep. 但是一个轻薄的外表并不意味着建筑本身没有深度。