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A RCHITECTURE IS THE RESULT OF AN INFINITE


MIRRORING OF TRANSLATIONS .

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.

Architecture is the result of an infinite mirroring of translations. All the great


buildings contain their virtual translation in a certain measure within
themselves. The projection of an interpretative scheme on a drawing or a
building is a 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. A translation is the result between the univocally
of the interpretative scheme and the ambiguity of the image. The architect who
is translating a building in a drawing or a drawing in a building proceeds
alternating schemes and corrections. These translations are not abstractions but
steps of successive definitions. The architectural imagery embodied in the
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drawings, acts as the gelling of architectural expression, the beginning of the


architectural dream.

In the practice of architecture, the cleverest segment of the process by which


our constructed world comes about has always been the translation of drawings
in buildings and buildings in drawings. Unfortunately, nowadays, these
intriguing and desirable operations are wrongly concealed within the meanders
of the back rooms set up by professional practices. Under the label of production
drawing, this segment of the art of architecture has become a prosaic activity.
This mundane and negative connotation originates within the educational realm.
The students of architecture are led to consider the translation of building in
drawings a frustrating procedure. They believe these drawings are an
unnecessary disciplinary demand that merely delays the growth and the
blooming of their individual design capabilities.

Two different graphic procedures dominate the present condition of


architecture. On the one hand, there are design drawings, on the other hand,
construction drawings. The making of design drawings is considered as the
most prestigious act of the profession: an artistic effort that carries a vision. In
these drawings, a rhetoric based on a desire of imitation dominates the mode of
production. The drawings are not rooted with a magic mimesis, but through
imitation, it is searched professional authority. The designer is not authoritative,
but the selected subject of its imitation—i.e., the original hut, the style etc.—is.
By congruity, the design drawings then become authoritative documents where
the designer is the only identified autocratic author. Whereas, construction
drawings, drafted by many hands, are considered merely safeguarding legal
documents translating a design construct into prescriptions for construction.
With this legal set of drawings, rhetoric of visual mono-directional translation is
the unacknowledged mode of production.

The professors and the professionals of architecture regard this part of


graphic version of constructive transactions as necessary, but indeed a dull
component of making architecture. A dreadful necessity to be left possibly to
building management. It is a predicament of management to make the building
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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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many architectural productions. For instance, Renaissance princes, in their


constructive urge, tried to emulate Classical Roman architecture and the English
gentry emulated the Venetian aristocrats in building of their villas.

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 Medieval version of the trade is based on conversion. The architectural


translations are based on acts of conversion of civic buildings in religious
buildings. The basilica, an administrative building, was converted in a religious
edifice. The term uerto indicates a concept of translation of complex and subtle
articulations. A conversion of a building is the translation of a building type in a
functionally opposite building type. The discriminating nature of this translation
is at the basis of long chains of building types. As the etymology of the name
states, the basilica edifice began its chronicle of magic mimesis, as the place of the
king. Then it transmuted in a market place that was transformed in a place for
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the administration of justices that was then converted in a religious building.


During the Middle Ages, administrative buildings emulated these religious
buildings. However, the name in these civic version was lost and this traditional
building type was called Palazzo della Ragione or Rathouse. Only in one case, the
name basilica returned to the building. In Vicenza, the Palazzo della Ragione is
again called Basilica. This happened after Palladio’s superficial transformation
of a medieval civic hall city presence within a Mannerist figure of a stone screen
made with classical looking Serlianas.

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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To translate between drawings and buildings is a manifestation of the


architectural faculty of instituting and recognizing equivalencies between
different objects. Two parallel lines are structurally equivalents to a wall. The
equivalence in a difference is the fundamental object of any architectural
representation. The translations of buildings in drawings are back-telling
phenomena and the translations of drawings in buildings foretelling phenomena.
Architecture results from these infinite mirroring of translations. The projection
of an interpretative scheme on a drawing or a building is a constitutive act of the
drawing or the building itself. The architect who is translating a building in a
drawing or a drawing in a building proceeds alternating schemes and
corrections. These translations are not abstractions but steps of successive
definitions. The students of architecture led to consider the translation of
building in drawings as a frustrating operation do not see them as design
drawings fostering poetic construction drawings. Translation is not imitation,
but a magic conversion of images. Through acts of well-delineated
constructions—poetic translations of a magic mimesis—drawings are
transfigured in buildings and buildings in drawings. . The drawings developed
for the construction of an edifice are a process of translation by which the facts
the architectural project become the reality of any building.

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