Architecture in translation : Germany, Turkey, & the modern house
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Bibliographic Information
Architecture in translation : Germany, Turkey, & the modern house
Duke University Press, 2012
- : pbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [337]-373) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Architecture in Translation, Esra Akcan offers a way to understand the global circulation of culture that extends the notion of translation beyond language to visual fields. She shows how members of the ruling Kemalist elite in Turkey further aligned themselves with Europe by choosing German-speaking architects to oversee much of the design of modern cities. Focusing on the period from the 1920s through the 1950s, Akcan traces the geographical circulation of modern residential models, including the garden city-which emphasized green spaces separating low-density neighborhoods of houses surrounded by gardens-and mass housing built first for the working-class residents in industrial cities and, later, more broadly for mixed-income residents. She shows how the concept of translation-the process of change that occurs with transportation of people, ideas, technology, information, and images from one or more countries to another-allows for consideration of the sociopolitical context and agency of all parties in cultural exchanges. Moving beyond the indistinct concepts of hybrid and transculturation and avoiding passive metaphors such as import, influence, or transfer, translation offers a new approach relevant to many disciplines. Akcan advocates a commitment to a new culture of translatability from below for a truly cosmopolitan ethics in a globalizing world.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Modernity in Translation 1
Translation beyond Language 6
The Theoretical Possibility or Impossibility of Translation 9
Appropriating and Foreignizing Translations 15
The Historical Unevenness of Translation 17
The Ubiquity of Hybrids and the Scarcity of Cosmopolitan Ethics 21
1. Modernism From Above: A Conviction about Its Own Translatability 27
New City: Traveling Garden City 30
New House: Representative Affinities 52
New Housing: The Ideal Life 76
From Ankara to the Whole Nation: Translatability from Above and Below 93
2. Melancholy in Translation 101
The Melancholy of Istanbul 107
A Journey to the West 119
The Birth of the "Modern Turkish House" 133
3. Siedlung in Subaltern Exile 145
Siedlung and the Metropolis 148
Siedlung and the Generic Rational Dwelling 175
Siedlung and the Subaltern 195
4. Convictions about Untranslatability 215
Untranslatable Culture and Translatable Civilization 215
"The Original" 218
Against Translation? The National House and Siedlung 233
5. Toward a Cosmopolitan Architecture 247
Ex Oriente Lux 249
Melancholy of the East 252
Weltarchitektur-Translation of a Treatise 263
Toward Another Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture 277
Epilogue 283
Notes 291
Bibliography 337
Sources of Illustrations 375
Index 383
by "Nielsen BookData"