B Y M ARCO F RASCARI
14 FEB 1998
T
he mystery of architecture is all in the divinatory nature of the mirroring
metaphors that rule the acts of translation from the built to the drawn.
The translations of buildings in drawings are back-telling phenomena
and the translations of drawings in buildings fore-telling phenomena. These
mirror-like phenomena, a speculative chiasm, are the hypogean structure, on
which the contemporary project of architecture must be erected. This project
recognizes architecture as an authoritative trade with an intellectual tradition
that begins earlier than the Enlightenment.
looking like the drawings. Nevertheless, during the past, these graphic
transactions, between designing and building, were the most poetic ones since
they were based on a magical mimesis. In these drawings, the relationships, set
between signs on paper and buildings, were not of efficient causality but of
formal causality of knowledge.
The real signs of proper construction drawings are magical signs. The
comprehension of the difference between the desire of imitation and the magic of
translation is the crucial means of access the use of drawings for dreaming up
building. On the one hand, the ideal of imitation is that of an organic recreation
from earlier texts or objects, in the sense of formal or substantive adoption. It is
as in the look-alike contests. On the other hand, recognized as necessarily
repetitive, translation aims to match form and substance in different means of
expression. Translation is not imitation, but a magic conversion of images. The
drawings developed for the construction of an edifice are a process of translation
by which the facts of an architectural project become the reality of any building.
Through an act of construction—a poetic translation, a magic mimesis—
drawings are transfigured in buildings and buildings in drawings.
The art of translation is the essential factor for understanding the tradition of
production and reproduction in the western culture. Translation is a trade based
on tradition that can also be betrayed. Two puns, in Italian, can translate this
concept in a form easy to remember, viz., traduttore = traditore (translator =
betrayer) and traduzione = tradizione (translation = tradition). In the
architectural trade, the western tradition begins with the Greeks, who considered
barbaric the languages and the architecture of other peoples and therefore they
where not interested in translations. Nevertheless, in their concept of
hermeneutics, there is the beginning of the concept of translation in architecture;
Hermes is the god that translates for the humans the hermetic language spoken
by the Olympic crowd. The etymology of the word hermes is uncertain but it
belongs to a semantic family that indicates a deep insight of the unknown. The
story of the invention of the Corinthian capital, as told by Vitruvius, gives us an
important clue for understanding the process of translation that took place in
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Greek architecture. The story narrates that Callimachus, a renowned artist, saw a
tomb of a young Corinthian maid, on which was placed a basket full of her
favorite objects. The basket was located on a bush of acanthus that grew around
the basket. On the basket, there was a square lid to keep everything in place and
that made the leaves of the acanthus to coil. Callimachus thought that the form
was new and beautiful and translated it in stone. The casual decoration of the
tomb, in the mind of Callimachus, becomes a paradeigma, a model to be translated
in the particulars of everyday.
For the Romans, the phenomenon of translation is more familiar and habitual,
although the translation is always intended from Greek. The terms used by the
Latin writers are interpres, interpretari, and interpretatio. These terms have an
economical-juridical origin, since they describe an act of mediation, something in
between two figures of price (inter-pretium). Roman interpretation is an act of
figuring out. A translation is the reconciliation between buyer price and seller
price every interpretation is an economic event, a transaction. An instance of it
can be easily singled out in the Palladian tradition. Palladio transacted the stone
columns of Antiquity in less expensive plastered brick-columns and Palladian
columns were translated in cheaper wood form in Colonial America.
With assimilating acts of interpretation, the Romans figured out the written
and built texts of the Greeks. The demonstration is in the work of Vitruvius
himself who had major problems with the translation of Greek terms in Latin.
Leon Battista Alberti pointed out this problem by indicating that the Vitruvian
text seems Latin to the Greeks and Greek to the Romans. In reality, the Roman
notion of translation is based on the idea of emulation (aemulatio). In his treatise
of architecture, Vitruvius has begun an operation of transformation of the
discipline. In his attempt to legitimize architecture, the Roman architect has
traced the path for the transformation of the art of building, from a profession
without culture (sine litteris), to a discipline that can be explained within an
encyclopedic knowledge. For Vitruvius, Architecture is a techne (art) among the
technai (arts) and the literary techne (art) is the paradigm of the Vitruvian act of
emulation. Emulation, a magic mimesis based on a challenge, is at the base of
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During the apogee of Roman Imperial Age the dominant term to indicate the
act of translation was the one favored by Seneca. The act of translation for
Seneca was mutare (to transmute). In architecture, a transmutation is a change
by which the actual and the symbolic building materials are traded for other
more precious building materials. Plaster is transmuted in marble by using the
Roman stucco. Mutare is a process of innovation, which made the building trade
to rediscover their roots in the alchemic tradition. The process is a search for the
perfect stone. Clay is transmuted in bricks and bricks are transmuted in glazed
tiles and so on in the search of the perfect long lasting material.
During the Alexandrine Age the Greek terminology for the translation is
metaphoro and the Latin emulation of the Greek term is transferre. The concept
embodied in this Hellenistic act of translation is a carry over of meaning.
Transferring the concept in architecture, this project of translation is a transport
of building elements conveying meanings. The equivalent concept in
architecture is a transport of building elements to convey meanings. The Roman
transported columns and many other architectural artifacts from Greece to
Rome, the Venetian from all over the Mediterranean basin to Venice, the
Americans from the Old Country to their new country. Traducere is metonymical
whereas translare is metaphorical.
The history of the hospital is a long record of conversions that began with the
translation of the cloister of monastery in a hospital courtyard. During the
Middle Ages, the theory of translation abandons the notion of imitation and
educes the notion of metamorphosis of the text. The preference is for
Umarbeitung rather than Uebersetzung. The transferre is identified with the
tradere. The translation is of sense rather than word by word.
To conclude I would like to recall that to translate a building in a drawing and a
drawing in a building means to alternatively to induce, to deduce and to abduce.
To induce is to infer general laws from particular cases, to deduce, i.e. to verify
what has been hypothesized at a certain level determines the successive levels,
and to abduce, i.e. to test new codes through interpretative hypothesis. From
this point of view, construction or survey drawings should be glamorous
descriptions of a building since visual perception has a constructive character.
The projection of an interpretative scheme on a drawing or a building is the
constitutive act of the drawing or the building itself. To translate an image
means to recognize or guess what has instituted it as image. This means to
institute an interpretation. The translation is the result between the univocity of
the interpretative scheme and the ambiguity of the image. Who is translating a
building in a drawing or a drawing in building proceeds alternating the scheme
and the correction. These translations are not abstractions but steps of successive
definitions.
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