Paperback

Published: 12th July 2012

Ships: 7 to 10 business days

RRP $41.99

$37.95

10%
OFF

 Add to Wishlist

Click on the Google Preview image above to read some pages of this book!

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 neighbourhoods 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 socio-political context and agency of all parties in cultural exchanges. Moving beyond the indistinct concepts of hybrid and trans-culturation 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.

"This study is seminal on two counts: it analyzes the relatively new concept of cultural translation, and it affords the reader an extremely interesting account of the evolution of Kemalist cultural policies." Kenneth Frampton, author of Form Material Assembly: The Work of Francis-Jones Morehen Thorp "Tracing the surprisingly intertwined twentieth-century histories of German and Turkish residential housing and urban planning from the garden city via the urban Siedlung to the national house, Esra Akcan brilliantly deploys lingual translation theory as a flexible template to analyze zones of asymmetrical exchange in architecture and urban planning. Architecture in Translation moves compellingly beyond modernist universalism and nationalist regionalism toward a cosmopolitan ethics as a goal for a global architecture." Andreas Huyssen, editor of Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age

ISBN: 9780822353089
ISBN-10: 0822353083
Audience: Professional
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 424
Published: 12th July 2012
Dimensions (cm): 23.1 x 15.7  x 2.3
Weight (kg): 0.676