Translations in Architecture

Abstract

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.