Review: Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, by Esra Akcan

Abstract

Esra Akcan Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012, 408 pp., 143 b/w illus. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 9780822353089; $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780822352945 Esra Akcan’s Architecture in Translation is a study in the remarkable migrations of modern architecture from Central Europe’s German-speaking lands to Turkey. Extrapolating from a linguistic metaphor, Akcan calls what transpired from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s “architecture in translation.” The author’s insight that the modern house and housing are two of the most contested constructs of German and Turkish architecture, and the way she locates architecture within the linguistic debates concerning translation in Turkey at the time, are brilliant. The historical material presented in this book, the extensive archival work, and the author’s ambition to devise a theory of translation, make it indispensable reading for anyone interested in the international experience of the modern movement. The first phase of “translations” traced in this book began when Hermann Jansen, a professor of architecture in Berlin, won the competition for the master plan of Turkey’s new capital. Jansen’s plan for Ankara amounted to a German reincarnation of the English garden city. Ankara’s modern layout, functional infrastructure, and hygienic green spaces were meant to highlight the Turkish Republic’s project for radical modernization and “Westernization.” In providing a new history of this episode, Akcan is attentive to the discrepancy in the perceptions of the garden city in Germany and in Turkey. Although it may have appeared outlandish to a Turkish audience in 1929, Jansen’s garden city offered a politically conservative alternative to Weimar Germany’s modernist social housing projects ( Siedlungen ). The German professor had an inclination to design suburban communities, inspired by the local vernacular, even when his Turkish clients demanded a “cubic” architecture to showcase their own modernity. A clear pattern emerges in these years: The Turkish bureaucrats recruited figures of professional authority in Germany, Austria, and France. Many of the new capital’s most representative buildings were commissioned to the Austrian professor Clemens …