Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 66

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House
By: Esra Akcan
Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 408pp.
$89.95. ISBN: 082235294X. Pbk.: $24.95. ISBN: 0822353083.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Nazan Maksudyan, PhD
Zentrum Moderner Orient
Berlin, Germany
Esra Akcan’s excellent book, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House focus on the history of German-Turkish
exchanges in residential architecture in the 20th century. With her analysis of the geographical circulation of major modern housing models and
ideas, consecutive chapters trace the translation of the garden city model in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century up to World War I; its
transformation into Weimar Siedlungen (residential settlements) during the interwar period, and the rise of national architecture under the Nazi
regime. In parallel to German architectural discourses and developments, the book describes the translation of the garden city theory and then of the
Weimar Siedlung theories in Turkey, as well as their hybridization and nationalization with the “Turkish house” discourse. Directing her attention
towards questions of urbanity, population, and housing, Akcan successfully situates architecture within the modernization paradigms of the new
Turkish republic.
Providing a basic outline of the intellectual debate on modernity and modernization, Akcan distances herself from three influential and competing
ideologies of the 20th century. First, she offers an alternative voice through translation, which does not perpetuate the colonial terms of cultural
criticism, such as civilized and backward, or international style and regionalism. Second, the book challenges the myth of problem-free
modernization, nationalization, and Westernization, which is predicated on the premise of smooth translatability. And third, the author does not
support the convictions of untranslatability and refrains from offering a return to a traditional “origin” as a solution. The book leans on the trope of
translation, not only to reject the thesis of a clash of civilizations between the West and its other, but also to offer an alternative to passive
metaphors such as import, influence, and transfer—all of which deny agency to the receiving location.
Akcan explores the concept of translation to explain interactions between places. The book conceptualizes translation as any cultural flow (traveling
of people, ideas, technology, information, and images) from one place to another under any condition. The act of transportation carries with it a
process of transformation as well. However, the author challenges the denigration of translation as a second hand and inferior copy of the original.
She alternatively argues that it is through translations that a place opens itself to what was hitherto foreign, namely a rejuvenating force for
changing and developing institutions and cultural forms. Moreover, translation reveals the voice of both s