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Translations in Architecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

Esra Akcan*
Affiliation:
Department of Art History, University of Illinois, Chicago, Ill.; e-mail: [email protected]

Extract

In a recently discovered photograph of German architect Bruno Taut's retrospective exhibition at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, which opened on 4 June 1938, Taut in-exile stands with Erica Taut and his assistant Şinasi Lugal in front of a display (see Figure 1). What interests me in this image is not so much the frontal figures who posed for it as the documentary value of the exhibit in the background, the photographs inside the photograph. These images display Taut's Siedlungen (residential settlements/collective housing projects), designed and constructed as part of the Berlin Housing Program (1924–33) just before Taut was exiled from Germany due to the rise of National Socialism. After stays in Russia and Japan, Taut moved to Turkey, where he became head of the Architecture Department at the Istanbul Academy. Through a seminar and a studio he taught on Siedlung, he participated in a translation of the idea of collective housing that would shape the discursive space and practice of architecture in Turkey for decades to come. Most of the images in the exhibition were taken by the now-famous photographer Arthur Köster. The exhibit bears witness to the fact that Turkish architects were exposed not only to the influential Siedlungen of the Weimar period in Germany but also to their soon-to-be canonical photographs earlier than most of their colleagues around the world.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 For books that explore cross-geographical dynamics in art and architecture, see, for example, Crinson, Mark, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Burlington: Ashgate, 2003)Google Scholar; Mercer, Kobena, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Roberts, Mary, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Çelik, Zeynep, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Dadi, Iftikhar, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Google Scholar; and Akcan, Esra, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For introductions to translation theories, see Brower, Reuben A., On Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schulte, R., Biguenet, J., ed., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Lefevere, André, Translation, History, Culture: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, Douglas, ed., Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester, U.K.: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997Google Scholar); Venuti, Lawrence, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gentzler, Edwin, Contemporary Translation Theories, 2nd ed. (Clevadon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 2001)Google Scholar; and Munday, Jeremy, Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.