Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House by Esra Akcan (review)

In the field of Turkish studies, scholarly works both on nation building and on place-making (to include architecture, urban planning, and associated fields) often begin by drawing attention to ways in which the early republic was shaped directly or otherwise by foreign ideas and concepts, documents, or advisors. Indeed, many of the designs for the nascent state's forward capital Ankara—a symbol of the new nation and many of its ideals—and its buildings derived not so much from Anatolian but from European planners. While many associated sources focus on this history as either a matter of irony or amid broader critiques of the Kemalist state's agenda for modernization, Esra Akcan's Architecture in Translation provides a new approach to engaging with and analyzing this account of visualizing and assembling a nationalist landscape of (and for) modern Turkey.

Focusing not on the paradox of an ultranationalist polity looking abroad amid its construction of sites and symbols, Akcan instead approaches this history with a goal to interrogate the experience of exchanges of ideas, information, images, and particular key actors between Turkey and Europe; she refers to these flows as "translations" in order to emphasize the cultural (and reciprocal) dynamics of such interactions. Introducing associated concepts of "smooth translatability" and "untranslatability," Architecture in Translation thus enables us to better problematize the nature of such flows and exchanges by revealing how they are processes fraught with obstacles, oversights, and agency. In particular, Akcan focuses on historicizing the invention of the "Turkish house" as both ideal and icon. Tracing its lineage, in large part, to Germany's early twentieth-century garden city ideals, this form of mass housing—also associated with the promotion of abundant green space—was ubiquitous in many plans for further developing the early republic's cities. Enabling this ambitious inquiry into the hybrid (and sometimes contentious) character of housing and city development, Akcan's archival research spans collections located in thirteen cities in six different countries.

Following the elaboration on the theme of translation and its theoretical underpinnings, the first chapter of the book examines how this problem of translatability was embedded in the notion of a garden city well before it arrived in Turkey. Noting the concept's origins in late nineteenth-century England and its subsequent rendering in the German context, Akcan details how the model was imbued with additional meanings and values. In Germany, and over the course of almost two decades, this garden city ideal developed further, and planners like Hermann Jansen (who drafted the 1909 master plan for greater Berlin and later drew plans for much of early republican Ankara) later came to Turkey steeped in this already hybridized tradition. From this essential overview of both the notion of translation and the history of the garden city model, Akcan progresses to interrogate how the garden ideal was translated from German into Turkish contexts. In doing so, she reveals how the model—in the eyes of both German planners and Turkish politicians—seemed to translate as a mechanism for societal modernization, constituting a form for a modern nation that only needed to have the people poured in to cure. Throughout her study, however, she reveals how on-the-ground outcomes were not simply a matter of transferring German designs to be built into the Turkish landscape; exchanges between architects and administrators were active and mutually influential. In some cases, the results emerged in ways that were translatable but paternalistic, and in other situations, outcomes were untranslatable amid chauvinism.

In her second chapter, Akcan moves beyond the communications among German planners and Turkish politicians to examine the reverberations of this discourse in Turkish society—especially in the context of an Istanbul that was actively reinscribed as antiquated, Oriental, and passé amid the early republic's push for modernization. Throughout this chapter, the concept of melancholy as a prevailing sentiment among residents, designers, and writers of Istanbul is conveyed...