The Building That Was a Timepiece: Translating The Time Regulation Institute to Architecture

Abstract

How could one forge a creative dialogue between texts and the physical spaces that they document, imagine or reinvent? This article 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 2020 in the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University Beirut (AUB). In the course, students were given the task of 'building' the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanp & imath;nar'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: Tanp & imath;nar'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 explores translation as a central theme, the article 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 critically resituated these spatial discourses within the mutually dependent social, political and cultural contexts in which they were imagined.