Aygen Erol Çakır, Mehmet Ali Gasseloğlu
https://doi.org/10.60152/4ceq9dre
Abstract: This paper examines how architectural knowledge is produced beyond built form by tracing its circulation across drawings, texts, exhibitions, archives, and moving-image practices. While interdisciplinarity is often framed as seamless collaboration, this study argues that the intermedial movement of ideas operates more precisely as translation, a process marked by rupture, displacement, and reinvention. Existing scholarship highlights the generative role of representation, yet a gap remains in mapping where and how translational operations reorganize architectural meaning, particularly in the unbuilt domain where work is frequently dismissed as preparatory or secondary. The objective is twofold. The term “translation” is employed here in both a conceptual and a methodological sense: conceptually, it denotes the shifting of meaning across disciplines; methodologically, it describes the analytical movement through which architectural ideas are traced across media. First, to theorize interdisciplinarity as a translational practice that alters both what is carried across and the frameworks that receive it; second, to propose a cartography, termed Geographies of Translation, that locates this practice in three terrains. Core Terrains track intra-disciplinary experiments where architecture re-articulates itself across. Threshold Terrains mark the discipline’s edge, where external perspectives reshape representational logics. Distant Terrains designate practices outside architecture that nevertheless produce architectural knowledge through estrangement. Methodologically, the study combines close reading of artifacts, media-archaeological attention to representation, and critical synthesis of architectural theory and cultural studies. The analysis yields three results. First unbuilt, and representational practices are shown to constitute sites of conceptual presence, not subordinate steps to construction. Second, this mediating process is recast as a constitutive rather than supplementary operation, dislocating and re embodying architectural ideas across media and disciplines. Third, interdisciplinarity emerges not as synthesis but as an unstable terrain generate critical value. By situating architecture within a constellation of translational terrains, the paper contributes a methodological and conceptual framework that redefines the role of the unbuilt, expands the scope of architectural historiography, and foregrounds translation as a condition of architectural knowledge.
Keywords: unbuilt; translation; interdisciplinarity; archive; art-architecture
How to cite this Paper (Harvard referencing style):
Erol Çakır, A. and Gasseloğlu, M. (2025) ‘Translational Terrains: The Interdisciplinarity of Spatial Narratives‘, in R. Bogdanović (ed.) On Architecture — Crosscutting and Fusion of Disciplines, Proceedings. Belgrade, Serbia: STRAND, pp. 175–187.
See publication On Architecture (2025) Conference Proceedings