IN T ROO U CT ION I Modernity in Translation

n a newspaper article that was by no means particularly un-

usual, a Turkish reporter informed his readers in 1935 about
a housing project in Germany, which the German architect
and urban planner HermannJansen suggested be used in Tur-
key for modernizing the country's residential architecture.
The Turkish reporter praised the project for the same reasons
that were cited as prewar garden city ideals in Germany: de-
tached low-rise houses in private gardens; ample green space
between buildings; hygienic urban space; rational, functional
houses; orderly streets; a unified neighborhood; function-
ing infrastructure; affordable construction; and so on.l This
article expresses a view common among professional Euro-
pean and Turkish architects at the time: the design of a group
of houses in Germany could be repeated in Turkey, according
to Jansen, who sent the project to the officials in the Turkish
government for their consideration. Additionally, the Turk-
ish journalist considered it appropriate, even ideal, to apply
a housing project designed for Germany to a site in Turkey.
Both the reporter and Jansen seem convinced that modern-
ism was smoothly translatable.

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 2, INTRODUCTION

Jansen was only one of the few hundred professionals connecting Ger-
many and Turkey during the first half of the twentieth century. When one
maps the influential German- and Turkish-speaking architects and urban
planners who migrated or traveled back and forth between Europe and
Turkey in the early twentieth century, at times moving even farther east
and west, the scope of interactions between the two regions will be evi-
dent. After founding the Turkish Republic in 1923 by overthrowing the
Ottoman Empire, the Kemalist state invited numerous experts from the
German-speaking ally countries to assist in the construction of the coun-
try's modern cities, buildings, and architectural schools, a process very
similar to the one in today's China, Gulf States, and ex-Soviet nations.
In the first decade of the republic, most of the architects designed their
projects for Turkey while remaining based in their home country, com-
municating through countless translated letters. Their visions were meant
to infiltrate the lives of the Turkish nation from the largest to the small-
est scale. The prewar garden city model, for example - which developed
in Germany partly as a result of a dialogue with British architects and
authors-was applied not only in the capital of Ankara, but in master
plans all over Turkey, such as in collective housing neighborhoods for the
new government officials and in residential villages for immigrants ar-
riving after the exchange of populations with the Balkan countries. Indi-
vidual houses for the new leader, Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, and other elite
officials increased the popularity of flat roofs rather than pitched ones,
plain stucco fa<;:ades rather than ornamental patterns, transparent surfaces
rather than wooden shutters, winter gardens rather than courtyards, and
fashionable modern furniture rather than built-in divans. However, even
in the most obvious examples of the official westernization program, the
results were never a direct copy of what happened in German modernism,
but significantly modified visions. They were transformed during trans-
lation, to use the term to be elaborated on in this book. But this term
involves much nuance, since these translations varied from excessive do-
mestication to abrupt intervention, and since they were set in motion
by multiple agents, including invited foreign professionals, their clients,
state officials, and Turkish architects - all of whom had varying opinions
about the translatability and untranslatability of architecture. Meanwhile,
a group of authors and architects in istanbul initiated an alternative path
to modern architecture in Turkey through both a welcoming of transla-
tion and a productively melancholic appreciation of the existing wooden
houses in the city. The German-Turkish connection was intensified after
the National Socialist (Nazi) regime came to power in Germany in 1933,

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 INTRODUCTION

which forced many German architects and city planners into exile in Tur-
key, where they occupied a variety of intellectual and political positions.
Although some stayed in Turkey as promoters of National Socialism and
its classical, monumental architecture, others who had fled from the Nazis
fought against this propaganda in Turkey. Most of these architects took
part in educating the new generation of Turkish architects and collabo-
rated with local professionals - a dialogue that had an impact that lasted
beyond the period of their sojourns in Turkey. Translations in the opposite
directions from Turkey to Germany also existed, although exposing and
criticizing asymmetry and inequality in modern cross-cultural encounters
is part of my intention. While in Turkey, many German architects and
planners outlined the future of postwar Germany and came to influential
posts afterward; some returned to Europe and advocated new positions
in urban design based on their migrant experience. After the 1960s, gen-
erations of Turkish immigrants moved to Germany and left their traces in
the migrant neighborhoods. To summarize, such cross-cultural exchanges
in the twentieth century mobilized by immigrants, exiles, travelers, inter-
national students, officials, and collaborating local architects significantly
transformed the urban and residential culture in Germany and Turkey.
The acknowledgment of earlier cross-cultural relations in a globaliz-
ing world has motivated this book. The routes of Turkish- and German-
speaking architects are analyzed here, but maps of such cultural circu-
lation for other countries would be similar. Moving from one place to
another during this process are not only people (exiled, immigrating, or
traveling architects and international students), but also capital, ideas (ar-
chitectural movements and theories), technologies (reinforced concrete
and equipment for kitchens and baths), information (including graphic
standards), and images (drawings and photographs). These circulations
and their transformative effects have been so ubiquitous during mod-
ern times that one can hardly think of any pure "local" architecture that
is produced at a place completely closed to other locations, or any pure
"global" building produced in some abstract space outside the influence
of local conditions. Rather, the diverse types of continuous translations
have shaped and are still shaping history, perpetually mutating definitions
of the local and the foreign.
This book explores the concept of translation to explain interactions
between places. Bi- and multilateral international transportation of
people, ideas, technology, information, and images generates processes of
change that I am defining as translations - a term I particularly find acces-
sible since it is a common experience, whether one has translated between

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 4 INTRODUCTION

two languages, mediums, or places. Translation, as it is conceptualized in

this book, takes place under any condition where there is a cultural flow
from one place to another? It is the process of transformation during the
act of transportation.
Conducting research for this book, I arrived at the concept of trans-
lation for an architectural culture better equipped for a global future.
As common as the words globalization, multinational, and cross-cultural
might be, the future remains unclear, since the forces of history are act-
ing in contrary directions. We live in a world where institutions in power
seem to perceive a benefit in perpetual conflict - today between "the
West" and "Islam" - a world where continuing geopolitical hierarchies
foreclose the promise of intertwined futures. Global historiographical
and design practices remain equally underdeveloped and under theorized.
This book offers translation as a way of transforming architecture into
a discipline that advocates more exchange between geographic locations
and more sophisticated knowledge about the entire world, while simulta-
neously eschewing both the hidden orientalist and isolationist studies that
also claim to have this intention. It offers translation as an alternative in
order not just to explore the potentials and missed opportunities of inter-
twined histories, but also to expose the tensions that block what is defined
here as a rewarding cosmopolitan ethic.
I participate in lingual translation theories that challenge its precon-
ception as a second-hand and inferior copy where the "origin" gets lost.
On the contrary, it is through translations that a place opens itself to what
was hitherto foreign, modifying and enriching its political institutions
and cultural forms while simultaneously negotiating local norms with
the other. This view of the foreign as a rejuvenating force, rather than a
threat, sharply differentiates this book from nationalist positions at the
time that it covers, as well as from mainstream geopolitical ones today.
Additionally, translation reveals the voice of both sides of a cross-cultural
exchange, which differentiates it from narratives that emphasize Western
agency alone. The book also demystifies the idea of translation as a neu-
tral bridge between cultures, since no translation has been devoid of the
geographical distribution of power or capital. As the reader will realize, in
the following pages I record many historical conditions that can hardly
be considered a neutral exchange between equals, and thus I analyze both
the liberating and the colonizing forces of translation. Translations estab-
lish a contact zone that not only makes cultural exchanges possible, but
also reveals the tensions and conflicts created by the perceived inequali-
ties between places. This is a contested zone where geopolitical tensions

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 INTRODUCTION

and psychological anxieties are exposed, and one where the possibility of
a cosmopolitan ethic emerges or is foreclosed.
As a historical account of one such interaction, this book treats re-
ciprocal translations as a field of study that identifies the qualifying terms
to help us understand and evaluate such exchanges. Looking at specific
examples and episodes in detail, it develops a terminology based on trans-
lation, such as convictions about smooth translatability and untranslat-
ability, appropriating and foreignizing translations, melancholy as a ten-
sion produced by translations, and translations for the sake of hybridity
and for the sake of a cosmopolitan ethic. It offers the trope of translation
for globalization studies not only to reject the thesis of a clash of civiliza-
tions between the West and its other, but also to offer an alternative to in-
distinct concepts such as hybrid and transculturation, and to passive meta-
phors such as import, influence, and transfer- all of which deny agency
to the receiving location. As it will become clearer to the reader, this book
writes the history of a continuing translation process, while avoiding three
common narratives: It does not perpetuate the colonial terms of cultural
criticism, such as civilized and backward, progressive international style and
regressive regionalism. It does not uphold the myth of problem-free mod-
ernization and the westernization of the world, which is predicated on the
premise of smooth translatability. Nor does it support the convictions of
untranslatability that glorify traditional origins and closed borders.
The following chapters focus on the history of German-Turkish ex-
changes in residential architecture in the twentieth century, analyzing the
geographical circulation of major modern housing models and ideas such
as the garden city, mass housing, the formal potentials of new technologi-
cal inventions, and the typological study of so-called national houses. On
the one hand, the book traces the translation of the garden city ideal in
Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century up to World War I,
and then its transformation into the Weimar Siedlungen during the inter-
war period in Germany. On the other hand, it also traces the translation
of the garden city and then of the Weimar Siedlung theories in Turkey, as
well as their different hybridizations with the "Turkish house" discourse
during the early republican period in Turkey. Because the world's urban
population has outnumbered the rural, housing remains one of the major
quandaries of world cities today, as informal settlements perpetuate en-
vironments with no convenient city services and hence bring into being
an urban poor living outside the social contract. This book integrates ar-
chitecture and urbanism through the study of housing, which has so far
lacked sufficient dialogue between the two disciplines. While discussing

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 6 INTRODUCTION

visions of innovative, alternative, or paradigmatic housing, it simulta-

neously demonstrates how these visions shaped and were shaped by the
urban culture beyond residential architecture. The book is therefore an
attempt to write an intertwined history of the modern city and architec-
ture, told through its visions of house and housing.
How is translation possible in the first place? What makes different
languages interchangeable, and different places compatible with each
other? How do products and ideas pertaining to visual culture, art, and
architecture get translated, and what are the ethical and political conse-
quences of these translations? Should a cultural circulation conceal the
differences between two places by domesticating the imported artifact
in its new location, or should it reveal some differences by letting a delib-
erate awkwardness and an estranging effect persist in the translated arti-
fact? To use the well-known words of Friedrich Schleiermacher, should a
"translator leave the writer alone as much as possible and move the reader
toward the writer," or "leave the reader alone as much as possible and
move the writer toward the reader"? 3 Is the test of a good translation
whether or not it looks like a translation? Is the ethical translation the
one that resists the implementation of a new set of standards in the local
context and appropriates the imported artifact into the local conditions,
or the one that refuses to assimilate the foreign into the local and inten-
tionally manifests the foreignness of the translated artifact? Who speaks
and who cannot speak during the process of translation? Translation as a
field of study explores every example in the light of such questions.

TRANSLATION BEYOND LANGUAGE

It is the translator's infidelity, his happy and creative infidelity that must
matter to us. - J 0 RGEL U I 5 B 0 R G E 5, "The Translators of the Thousand
and One Nights" (trans. Esther Allan)

Baudolino, the main character of Umberto Eco's novel with the same
title, was born with a peculiar gift. He could learn to speak any language
after practicing a few sentences with a newfound companion who spoke
it. Not burdened by the multiplicity of languages as ordinary humans
are, Baudolino could have been the perfect peacemaker: he could have
easily bridged the gaps between any two groups of dissimilar tongues, re-
solved any misunderstandings, and enjoyed communicating with people
in whichever language they spoke. 4 Can Baudolino's talent for languages
serve as a metaphor for translation in nonlinguistic mediums, such as the

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