Translation : Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 2014

Abstract

The 31st conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) has taken ‘Translation’ as its theme. The call for papers invited the contributors to explore translation, understood as the conscious transfer of ideas or buildings from one context into another.

As a term in the wider sense, translation acknowledges the fact that the translator is aware of the necessary changes the idea has to undergo in order to be meaningful ‘on the other side’ of the process. Thus, it is not simply a mechanical act of transferring an idea into a new realm but a creative act. Translations may therefore result in new creations, via conscious adaptation, via misunderstandings or misappropriations. But distortion, misunderstanding, … - they can all result in new inventions: if wilful or not, they are part of translations.

Papers in this conference have taken up the theme in a multitude of ways. The investigations range from linguistic questions of translation to the problems of physical dislocation of architecture and its shifting context. Papers explore cultural questions, related to the Indigenous in Australia and Maori in New Zealand; and related to colonialism and to shifts in political paradigms. They formulate the clashes between architectural establishment and younger generations of architects ; they explore the manifold issues that occurred in the spread of the Modern Movement, in that architects themselves moved – emigrated – and took notions of architecture with them, or in that the new ideas were disseminated by ways of education and symposia. Approaches, theories and techniques have been explored, as in the translation from drawing to building.