An Architecture of Translation
“The life of the originals attains in translations its ever-renewed latest and abundant flowering” Walter Benjamin, from ‘The Task of The Translator 1923
The early twentieth century philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote a very insightful essay – The Task of The Translator which we can use to explore the idea of translation in architecture. The statement is a way to read much of the Victorian architecture of Dublin. This period was very influenced by architecture from the English colonies. The markets of Dublin built at this time, for instance Smithfield fruit and vegetable markets, Iveagh markets or George’s street market were modelled on examples of Moghul Architecture being discovered in Pakistan and India. This was centred on a colonial appropriation of ‘the exotic’, the excitement of newness and the collection of the cultural production of others.
We are similarly translating works of this same architectural period in Pakistan into the language of the architecture of Dublin (architecture is indeed a language). In the new globalised world our clients are Irish, but of Pakistani extraction and the building type, a mosque, replicates the function of a distant original while ‘grafting’ itself on to a Victorian Dublin ‘root stock’. This seems a fairer exchange that speaks of the more open inclusive society that we live in now.
We now find new life for the architectural typology of Mosque as it travels to a new locale while expanding the potential language of Dublin buildings.
Benjamin describes this well in further detail. The German word for bread is ‘brot’ while in French it is ‘pain’. When the French person thinks of bread, of ‘pain’ he thinks of a crusty baguette while the German person conjures up images of a black rye bread, of ‘pumpernickel’, of ‘Brot’. Benjamin is concerned with how the translator grapples with this.
In this project we are more interested with how the contemporary world allows the French, German and Irish to share all the meanings of ‘bread’ and that through this exchange something new is created.
We are creating an indigenous Dublin mosque, that has a sense of ‘Mosque-ness’ while also having a sense of ‘Dublin-ness’.
