- 3 I Fashion a Nest Between Spines & Stories
- 4 Sonic Beirut, Displaced
- 5 The Translation Institute
- 6 Air as Commodity, Image as Spectacle
- 7 Auditory Escape
essays
2 Between City and Self
Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education
The Building that Was a Timepiece:
Translating The Time Regulation Institute to Architecture
Translating The Time Regulation Institute to Architecture
Journal: Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education (forthcoming)
Co-authors: Professor Kıvanç Kılınç, Izmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH)
Hadi Kassar, Independent Researcher
Ralph Karam, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts & Sciences
Abstract
How could one forge a creative dialogue between texts and the physical spaces that they document, imagine, or reinvent? This paper explores the idea of intersemiotic translation from a work of literature to architecture through a selection of student works produced in an undergraduate elective (Building Texts) offered online in 2020 in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). In the course, students were given the task of “building” the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s internationally acclaimed novel, The Time Regulation Institute (1961) in the form of visual representation. The purpose was not to illustrate the content, but trigger an intermedial exchange: Tanpınar’s novel gives a detailed account a fictional modern institute, which serves no purpose other than synchronizing every clock in the country and fine those whose watches are running slow. But the complexity and eclectic character of the architecture, as well as the absurdity of its supposed function, compelled students to go beyond straightforward solutions and minimized the likelihood of ‘translating’ the content into familiar shapes and forms. By introducing one final project in more detail that explore translation as a central theme, the paper discusses how such interactions between architecture and literature could be mobilized as an imaginative pedagogical tool. As the project illustrates, students have not only connected textual spaces to the ‘actual spaces’ informing the novel’s narrative structure, but also, they have critically resituated these spatial discourses within the mutually dependent social, political and cultural contexts in which they were imagined.
How could one forge a creative dialogue between texts and the physical spaces that they document, imagine, or reinvent? This paper explores the idea of intersemiotic translation from a work of literature to architecture through a selection of student works produced in an undergraduate elective (Building Texts) offered online in 2020 in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut (AUB). In the course, students were given the task of “building” the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s internationally acclaimed novel, The Time Regulation Institute (1961) in the form of visual representation. The purpose was not to illustrate the content, but trigger an intermedial exchange: Tanpınar’s novel gives a detailed account a fictional modern institute, which serves no purpose other than synchronizing every clock in the country and fine those whose watches are running slow. But the complexity and eclectic character of the architecture, as well as the absurdity of its supposed function, compelled students to go beyond straightforward solutions and minimized the likelihood of ‘translating’ the content into familiar shapes and forms. By introducing one final project in more detail that explore translation as a central theme, the paper discusses how such interactions between architecture and literature could be mobilized as an imaginative pedagogical tool. As the project illustrates, students have not only connected textual spaces to the ‘actual spaces’ informing the novel’s narrative structure, but also, they have critically resituated these spatial discourses within the mutually dependent social, political and cultural contexts in which they were imagined.
* A paper analyzing the premise and outcome of the course “Building Texts” taught by Professor Kıvanç Kılınç at AUB *