Esra Akcan Livres

The International Building Exhibition 1984/87 in Berlin constitutes one of the most remarkable examples to discuss „open architecture“. Almost 10,000 dwellings were constructed or restored in the Kreuzberg districts adjacent to the Berlin Wall, inhabited about halfway by immigrants. The renowned author Esra Akcan, related in many ways to Turkey, Berlin and the USA, narrates the history and reverberations of this architectural-political event.

Turkey, by including modern and contemporary periods which are usually omitted in traditional surveys of Islamic art and architecture, places architecture in the larger social, political and cultural context of the country's development as a modern nation in the twentieth century.

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 neighborhoods 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 sociopolitical context and agency of all parties in cultural exchanges. Moving beyond the indistinct concepts of hybrid and transculturation 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. Esra Akcan is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is the author of (Land)Fill Istanbul: Twelve Scenarios for a Global City. "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