In this excellent book on cultural theory and architectural history, Esra Akcan draws on the concept of translation from linguistics and philosophy to advance a new theoretical approach in visual studies and architecture. Motivated by the current overexposure of cultural flows in architecture and urbanism within a globalizing world, Akcan focuses on an exemplary case from the history of modern architecture. The book offers a vivid and comprehensive reappraisal of the intertwined architectural histories of German-speaking countries and Turkey from the 1920s to the 1950s, with a special emphasis on models of modern residential buildings.
Akcan conceptualizes translation as the processes of transformation that takes place under conditions of cultural flow from one place to another. In her words, translations establish “contact zones,” providing the possibility of cultural exchange, and “contested zones,” exposing geopolitical tensions and psychological anxieties under the perceived inequalities between places. She mentions three common narratives on crosscultural relations as needing to be approached critically: the colonial terms of cultural criticism; the myth of problem-free modernization and westernization of the world, premised on the promise of smooth translatability; and the convictions of untranslatability that glorify traditional origins and closed borders. The author elaborates the various positions between the theoretical possibility and impossibility of translation, which may also serve as templates for analyzing architecture: smooth translatability from above; untranslatability, appropriating translation, and foreignizing translation; melancholy as a tension produced by translation; translation for the sake of hybridity; and translation for the sake of a cosmopolitan ethic. To comprehend the complexities and singularities of acts of translation, their contextualization in geopolitical realms, including the agencies of all parties taking part in the cultural exchange, is essential. Akcan, in her choice of houses on which to focus and housing as a topic that conveys the complexity and singularity of crosscultural encounters, presents an example par excellence of this kind of multiplicity. The book, in addition to making a theoretical contribution to the field, provides an up-to-date review of the intertwined histories of German and Turkish residential architecture and urbanism in the interwar period. Akcan collected almost all the available archival material on German and Turkish architecture at personal and institutional archives in thirteen cities across six countries, and she represents these literary and visual materials in clear academic prose, with perfectly economic summaries of their content. Such discipline in the representation and interpretation of the material, and in situating it within complex, overarching debates, gives the work the quality of a source book.
The history of urban and architectural translation between Germany and Turkey from the 1920s to the 1950s is not uniform; encounters took place on different occasions and under different circumstances. Akcan outlines the defining episodes, which form the structure of the book, while at the same time describing in detail different theoretical definitions of translation. The first and largest episode, “Modernism from Above,” covers the Kemalist Westernization project in Turkey through an analysis of the construction of a new capital city—Ankara—by German-speaking professionals. According to Akcan, both the Kemalist state and the modern architects shared conviction in the smooth translatability of culture. One found its ideal model in the West; the other believed in the international relevance of its own solutions and premises. Tracing the archaeology of the garden city model in the German sphere from Britain to Turkey, Akcan demonstrates that the planning model that Hermann Jansen applied in Ankara was the prewar German garden city, which projected low density and dispersed settlements with freestanding single houses in large private gardens. Unlike garden cities in the West, which were designed to address the problems of industrialization and working-class housing, the garden city in Turkey was translated for accomodating the state elite. Analyzing this act of foreignizing translation, Akcan demonstrates how Jansen's attempts at appropriating translations from the local residential context were dismissed by local clients and how within two decades the prewar German garden city model in Turkey had been “lost in translation,” giving way to denser apartment blocks. The first episode also covers the ideal house imagined by the state elite (a translation from Viennese cubic architecture) within the garden city and the architecture of President Kemal Atatürk's residences by Clemens Holzmeister and Seyfi Arkan. As a Turkish architect sent to Germany for education, Arkan was one of the few to experience the German modern architectural milieu in place. Displaying architectural criticism at its finest, Akcan traces Arkan's projects, from when he was educated in Germany to when he served as Turkey's state architect, detecting immanent elements of appropriating translations within their apparent modernist forms.
The second episode, “Melancholy in Translation,” covers the contested zones within the context of smooth translatability from the West. In these zones, the non-Western subject's psychological crisis unfolded in different forms. Akcan describes the sentimental reactions in Turkish literature for the abandoned old capital, Istanbul, and how a similar mentality shaped the experience of Sedad Hakkı Eldem, another architect sent to Germany for education. Excavating Eldem's notebooks before and during his travels in Europe, as well as his earlier projects, Akcan describes his modes of melancholy between self-hate and self-love, between fascination for and resistance to the West. She also describes how, in search of modern values within local architectural history (appropriating translation), he tried to construct an ideal out of the traditional “Turkish house.” Akcan proposes and theorizes the notion of “melancholy” to convey the tensions experienced by the non-Western subject, who feels excluded or lacking possible perfection in asymmetrical translations from the West. Melancholy is a significant theoretical notion, and opens new debates in studies on cultural history, Westernization, and orientalism.
The third episode, “Siedlung in Subaltern Exile,” focuses on the indirect consequences of German politics through the story of a group of protagonists of modern architecture who moved to Turkey after the National Socialist regime's takeover in 1933. As the prewar garden city model was being applied in Turkey in the 1920s, a different kind of mass housing was theorized and applied in Germany and Austria: the socialist siedlung model with middle density units around shared urban parks. The siedlung as an up-to-date model was translated into Turkey within the studios of architectural education and several unrealized proposals for the state. Given that most of these translations, with their internationalist claims, were intentionally foreign to local contexts (such as the uniform siedlungs that were proposed to replace the historical residential fabric of Istanbul), the book raises a few cases where site-specific features were appropriated (as in Bruno Taut's studio works in the academy). The third episode also questions the possibility of translation from below with a consciousness of the subaltern—nondominant, nonhegemonic, nonelite groups of society—in Germany and Turkey (as positively manifested in the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's village-school projects in Turkey).
The fourth episode, “Convictions about Untranslatability,” is on the emergence of the notion of Turkish architecture from individual melancholy to nationalism over a span of two decades. Akcan shows how the traditional Ottoman Istanbul house was translated into a modern architectural taxonomy and how the architecture of the “Turkish house” emerged as the core of nationalist architecture in and outside the domestic sphere. Ironically, the only applied mass-housing project in the 1940s was realized by Paul Bonatz (a sympathizer of the regime in Germany) in the language of the reinvented Turkish house. For Akcan, this is an important example of translation for the sake of hybridity, a mixture of the siedlung model (without its original socialist intentions) and the nationalist imagery of the Turkish house.
The fifth episode, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Architecture,” is on the writings, projects, and buildings of Bruno Taut during the last five years of his career, which he spent in Japan and Turkey. Taut was outside of mainstream modernism with his Berlin siedlungs, through which he developed a consciousness of the form of publicly shared places as well as heterogenizing issues such as the use of color. Akcan describes the melancholy of Taut in the East, pointing to the difference of his architecture in translation. Rather than maintaining a nationalist position, the architect embraced the possibility of the foreign as a rejuvenating force and demonstrated a cosmopolitan ethic in his work. In this way, Taut emerges as the “Rosetta Stone” of Akcan's theory and history of architecture in translation—he is key for advocating cosmopolitan architecture in the current conditions of a globalizing world.
An important contribution to cultural theory and architectural history, Architecture in Translation is specifically recommended for those interested in cultural translations in the history of the Middle East. Given the richness of its literary and visual references as well as its fluent writing style, it is an intellectual joy to read.
