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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822395577 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 29 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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.
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ARCHITECTURE IN TRANSLATION
Germany, Turkey, & the Modern HouseBy ESRA AKCAN
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5294-5
Chapter One
Modernism from Above A conviction about its own translatability
The Turkish Republic, established in 1923, was initially antagonistic to both its Ottoman precedents and the French, British, and Italian forces against which the War of Independence had been fought. It should not be surprising then, that it chose its German-speaking allies as the visible model for its modernizing and Westernizing reforms. Among the German professionals invited to Turkey during the early republican era, it is worth mentioning such prominent figures as Ernst Reuter, later mayor of West Berlin; composers and literary critics such as Carl Ebert, Leo Spitzer, and Erich Auerbach; economists and lawyers such as Fritz Neumark, Gerhard Kessler, and Alexander Rüstow; doctors such as Rudolf Nissen and Philipp Schwartz; and architects, artists, and city planners such as Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Hermann Jansen, Gustav Oelsner, Paul Bonatz, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Wilhelm Schütte, and Rudolf Belling. Many Turkish architects of the period received part of their professional education in Germany. For example, Sedad Eldem went to Germany on a study tour with a state fellowship in 1928; Seyfi Arkan studied architecture in Berlin and worked in Hans Poelzig's office from 1930 to 1933; Arif Hikmet Holtay studied in Stuttgart and Berlin from 1926 to 1930; Emin Onat studied in Zurich around 1933–34; and Emin Necip Uzman worked in the office of the Berlin-based architect Fritz August Breuhaus from 1937 to 1939. However, the republican elite refused to rely on Turkish talent, perhaps because many of the experienced architect-builders (kalfa) of the Ottoman Empire after the eighteenth century were members of the Armenian or Greek minority groups whose successors the last Ottoman sultans and the new Turkish state avoided working with, and perhaps because the newly educated Turkish architects seemed too young for the task, with notable exceptions who were associated with Ottoman revivalism.
The Kemalist intellectuals in Turkey did indeed consider linguistic translation a crucial act of modernization. Just three years after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, a Copyright and Translation Committee (Telif ve Tercüme Heyeti) was created in the Parliament. In 1935 the philosopher Hilmi Ziya Ülken published Uyanis Devirlerinde Tercümenin Rolü (The role of translation during ages of reawakening), a book that associated reawakening (uyanis) with the growth of translation. Drawing examples from a variety of places and historical periods, Ülken argued that the human mind owed the great intellectual and cultural leaps it made to translation. "Those who don't know how to open their doors wide to all influences cannot create anything new," he wrote. "Translation is that which gives the creative power to the eras of awakening." In 1938, the first Turkish Publication Congress (Nesriyat Kongresi) decided to establish a Translation Office under the minister of education, then Hasan Ali Yücel. Both the directors and the relatively autonomous authors who worked with this office had high hopes for translation. They imagined themselves at the threshold of a new age, no matter how many works had been translated from Arabic and Persian by their predecessors during the Ottoman Empire, and from French after the Tanzimat reforms in 1839—and no matter how broadly Ottoman thinkers such as Ahmet Mithat had contributed to translation practices and theories.
Both Ülken and Yücel were convinced of the universality of civilization and hence of the translatability of languages. In the very first editorial of the office's journal, Tercüme (Translation), Yücel wrote: "Civilization is a whole [Medeniyet bir bütündür]. East and West, new and old worlds are the representations of the same whole with individual differences.... It is natural that a translator enriches the world of ideas in his own community by bringing in concepts from another." When human civilization was perceived as one continuous evolution made possible by translation, the argument effortlessly followed that the new Turkish Republic, allegedly unlike the Ottoman Empire, had to join this world civilization primarily by translating world classics. This approach was not limited to literature alone. Translation could refer to a broad range of activities rather than simply conversion from one language to another. Cities and their houses could also be constructed through a translation process.
Studying the German-Turkish exchange in residential culture is a particularly informative way to explore the role of translation in shaping both modern Turkey and the globalizing world. The relationship between the two countries took specific turns throughout history. The diplomatic associations between the Ottoman and Prussian Empires intensified during the eighteenth century, as part of the modernization policies of the former and the pursuit of military alliances favorable to both. The Ottoman-Prussian Pact of Friendship was signed in 1761 and a military alliance in 1790, which triggered a period of intensified economic relations. During the industrialization period, Germany, competing against France and Britain, sought to find new resources and markets in Ottoman lands. The German-Ottoman Treaty of Commerce that gave extensive legal rights to German firms was signed in 1890, followed by the establishment of several German banks and schools in the Ottoman Empire. The construction of the Baghdad Railway across Ottoman territory, a battlefield of international rivalry since 1856, was exclusively handed to German firms in 1903, which decisively increased the accessibility of Ottoman resources and markets for the European power. According to Rosa Luxemburg, the agreement was bound to be the destroyer of the Ottoman Empire because paying the money needed to support a railway system it could not maintain would ruin a country based on agriculture. Faced with economic and political hardships, the Ottoman army increasingly relied on educational support from Germany during this period, and the two countries remained allies during World War I.
Historians have often argued that the German military and economic presence had a smaller impact on the cultural life of the Ottoman Empire than the presence of the French, British, and Italians. For instance, the number of German schools was far smaller than the number of other European ones. According to the census of 1850, there were around 1,000 German-speaking residents in Istanbul; in 1918 this number had only increased to 1,300. Nevertheless, toward the end of the Ottoman Empire, ten main German associations were functioning in Istanbul, including the Center for German-Speaking Residents (founded in 1847) and the German Women's Association of Istanbul (founded in 1856), in addition to the German schools of Istanbul in Pera, Haydarpasa, Bebek, and Yedikule. The newspaper Osmanische Post was first published in 1890 (it closed in 1895), and the legendary Osmanischer Lloyd in 1908. The German-Turkish Friendship Association (Freundschaftshaus, Dostluk Cemiyeti), founded in 1914, sought to reinforce the cultural relations between the two countries. In the words of its charter, the association aimed to "inform the Turkish people about Germany and put an end to French cultural imperialism." As part of its program, the association organized the German-Turkish House of Friendship architectural competition among Werkbund architects in 1916.
This perceived lack of cultural interaction between Germany and Turkey changed significantly with the major transformations that followed World War I. The German-Turkish Treaty of Friendship, signed on March 3, 1924, restored the diplomatic and commercial relations between the two countries, which had been officially disrupted since 1918. The newspaper Türkische Post started publication in 1926; the first German-Turkish dictionary using the Roman alphabet was published in 1931.
NEW CITY: TRAVELING GARDEN CITY
City planning and architecture were among the first fields to show the effects of the reinstated alliance between Germany and Turkey. On October 13, 1923, the Kemalist state declared Ankara to be the new capital of Turkey and, from the following year onward, employed German-speaking planners and architects to build it. Making Ankara the capital city was a significant political and cultural statement, announcing that Istanbul—the symbol of the Ottoman Empire and the quintessential multicultural city of the East—was no longer to serve as the country's administrative and political center. Rather, a minute and relatively undeveloped settlement in Anatolia, one that had been Turkey's military center during the War of Independence, would be built anew as the locus for the revolutionary changes the Kemalist revolution was yet to introduce. Constructing a new capital city for a new nation required not only a youthful, futuristic, and assertive enthusiasm, but also the erasure of the past and the fierce assimilation of Turkey's diverse ethnic groups under the purified umbrella of the nation.
Nineteenth-century travelers depicted Ankara as a poor, "melancholic and unkempt" settlement. The census of the period documented an ethnically and religiously mixed population with a majority of Muslims and minorities of Greek Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant people. Descriptions of the city from the 1930s, in contrast, stated over and over again that the republican revolution was building a totally new, modern, and grandiose Turkish town from scratch on the same land (fig. 1.1). The contrast between the prerepublican and republican Ankara has been exaggerated in the official historiography, which offered self-congratulatory praise for the achievements of the new nation-state. For famous novelists of the revolution—including Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu, who wrote a book on the city—Ankara would be everything that Istanbul had lost, a symbol of Turkey's decolonization from Western forces that occupied the country after World War I (if not earlier) and its commitment to modernization through Westernization—namely, a new symbolic city that would simultaneously be anti-Western and Western, and as such an embodiment of the constant dilemma in the country's cultural production for many years to come.
Contemporary accounts suggest that the architecture of Ankara was seen as a test case of the young nation's ideological aspirations. In "Hülya Bu Ya" (Well, it is a fancy, 1921), Refik Halid [Karay] created a science-fiction story, narrated by a fascinated American tourist. Here, the future Ankara was a city with moving streets that made all vehicles and walking obsolete, a city with no roofs or glassed windows because the climate was regulated by a huge machine that protected the inhabitants from rain and snow, and excessive heat and cold. The machines of modernity also turned all nights into a perpetual day. "It's true," said the American tourist in the story, "these are only necessary in our backward cities of Europe and America." This satirical story not only demonstrates the high expectations invested in Ankara by Mustafa Kemal's followers but also ridicules their blind admiration of Western technological progress. Here the success of the city was measured against the feelings of inferiority it could cause in a Westerner—revealing, in fact, the feeling of backwardness sensed by the Turkish rulers themselves.
As early as 1924, the Kemalist state asked the German planner Carl Lörcher to prepare a master plan for Ankara, trusting the foreign expert in the relatively new discipline of city planning to ensure the capital's hygienic, well-equipped, and controlled growth. Designed to accommodate 150,000–200,000 inhabitants, Lörcher's plan did actually lay down the principles of the Governmental Complex (Regierungsstadt) that were followed by his successor, but it differed in policies for the old town's rehabilitation and new housing. For residential areas, Lörcher anticipated a very low density of one-to-two-story row houses with large private gardens, organized around big, common lawns and additionally bonded by a community center with a small mosque (fig. 1.2). Repeating a premise that was widely shared by his colleagues in Germany, Lörcher envisioned generous green spaces as a moral virtue and thus a major gift of modern city planning to humanity.
The municipality of Ankara found Lörcher's rehabilitation plan for the old town financially unfeasible and his master plan for the new areas inadequate to respond to the growing demand for housing. Consequently, a new competition was organized between Hermann Jansen, Joseph Brix—both were from the Berlin-Charlottenburg Technical University, and they had shared the first prize for the Greater Berlin master plan competition in 1909—and Léon Jaussely, a professor of urban composition at the Paris Institut d'Urbanisme and the winner of Barcelona's master plan competition. The contestants visited Ankara in July 1927 and submitted their proposals in November 1928. Six months later, on May 16, 1929, the jury, enforced by Atatürk's strong presence, gave Jansen the first prize and Jaussely the second. The two had quite different approaches to the existing urban fabric and new housing. Jaussely suggested that the old city, the Citadel, needed to be completely reconstructed, whatever the cost. "Today Ankara really looks like a simple village rather than a central governmental city," he said, presenting a long list of the city's additional shortcomings—such as its topographical limitations caused by the hilly landscape, its excessive climatic conditions, and the inadequacy of its soil for vegetation. Despite his brutally honest analysis of Ankara's inadequacies, Jaussely's plan was more ambitious than those of his competitors, suggesting wide, straight, monumental streets and promenades, ring avenues and boulevards, and large public squares with symbolic monuments and sculptures—decisions that were criticized for being too extravagant, unrealistic, and expensive in contemporary newspapers. Jansen, on the other hand, invested a highly symbolic significance in Ankara's Citadel and the traditional houses of the old city, comparing them to Rome's Capitoline Hill and Pergamon's Acropolis. Yet, wanting to avoid the costs that had caused the rejection of Lörcher's rehabilitation plan, he proposed deferring any significant work in this area. More important, Jansen proposed the garden city model, rather than one associated with denser, monumental, and axial European cities of the nineteenth century.
The difference between Jaussely and Jansen was revealed most clearly in their proposals for new housing. Jaussely distinguished between a "closed system" and an "open system": the former consisted of five-story building blocks surrounded by streets in the front and enclosed common courtyards at the back, while the latter referred to free-standing villas in a garden, for which Jaussely used the French word banlieue. The denser closed system, reminiscent of nineteenth-century European urbanism, would have characterized Ankara's center. The open system was suggested only for the peripheries. Jansen, in contrast, forcefully condemned any residential texture that remotely resembled the nineteenth-century urban blocks: "In many European cities, the health of the city inhabitants was sacrificed to appearances. Boulevards on the front, but dim courtyards with dirty air on the back. This, accompanied with the lack of empty areas, caused the degeneration of many stratums of the masses"—a statement that again attached health and moral virtue to city form. Jansen proposed instead to construct the new houses of the capital as a garden city.
The garden city ideal and its executions in different countries are the most evident examples of the power of translation in shaping world cities. The theory is usually credited as one of the founding ideas that led to the emergence of city planning as a modern discipline, and has usually been mentioned in modern architecture surveys. The garden city was a frequently circulated model of the twentieth century, reemerging in different locations as Gartenstadt, bahçesehir, cité jardin, cuidad jardin, den-en toshi, and tuinstadt, although each translation was considerably transformed in relation to the original. Germany, the United States, France, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Russia, Australia, and Turkey were all early destinations of the traveling garden city. The term and model was freely interpreted, often resulting in what would be more appropriately called a garden suburb, garden factory village, or simply collective housing with garden city principles. Unlike scholars who characterize these processes as mistranslations, maintaining the existence of a linear history in which the true modernization takes place in one place and any diversion from the "original" is perceived as distortion, I call them translations that make world history. Following the idea's path from England to Turkey via Germany will reveal the history of one of these translations.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ARCHITECTURE IN TRANSLATION by ESRA AKCAN Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Modernity in Translation 1
Translation beyond Language 6
The Theoretical Possibility or Impossibility of Translation 9
Appropriating and Foreignizing Translations 15
The Historical Unevenness of Translation 17
The Ubiquity of Hybrids and the Scarcity of Cosmopolitan Ethics 21
1. Modernism From Above: A Conviction about Its Own Translatability 27
New City: Traveling Garden City 30
New House: Representative Affinities 52
New Housing: The Ideal Life 76
From Ankara to the Whole Nation: Translatability from Above and Below 93
2. Melancholy in Translation 101
The Melancholy of Istanbul 107
A Journey to the West 119
The Birth of the "Modern Turkish House" 133
3. Siedlung in Subaltern Exile 145
Siedlung and the Metropolis 148
Siedlung and the Generic Rational Dwelling 175
Siedlung and the Subaltern 195
4. Convictions about Untranslatability 215
Untranslatable Culture and Translatable Civilization 215
"The Original" 218
Against Translation? The National House and Siedlung 233
5. Toward a Cosmopolitan Architecture 247
Ex Oriente Lux 249
Melancholy of the East 252
Weltarchitektur—Translation of a Treatise 263
Toward Another Cosmopolitan Ethics in Architecture 277
Epilogue 283
Notes 291
Bibliography 337
Sources of Illustrations 375
Index 383