Model House – Mapping Transcultural Modernisms investigates and maps out the network of encounters, transnational influences, and local appropriations of an Architectural Modernity as manifested in various ways in Israel, India, and China. The project focuses on the manifold relationships and actors involved in the implementation and realization of architectural projects that served as exemplary standard models for Western societies and beyond. The examination of modernism as a transnational and transcultural project is based on three case studies that were built during the time of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, but until now were mainly examined and described from the perspective of Western or nation-centered historiography. Model House responds to the Eurocentric discourse on modernism with a multiperspectival and polycentric form of artistic and cultural studies-based knowledge production informed by postcolonial critique. Model House develops and pursues forms of practice and presentation distinguished by the equal use of artistic, theoretical, and empirical methods in their respective networks. The basic question is formulated in a deliberately open way: Who or what builds a city or a city district? (1) The assumption that spaces/places are characterized by the constant interaction of many different actors under unequal conditions implies that Model House chooses a praxeological perspective that initially grasps everything as action, i.e. regards everything that exists as furnished with agency. The built environment is not just simply built and inhabited, but is formed based on and in interaction with the given political, social, technological, and economic conditions, public discourses, concepts, artistic and scientific production. While research on the theory of transculturality has until now concentrated on the comprehensive space of the “Black Atlantic” (2), Model House investigates building projects as sites and spaces of transculturality in three case studies located at a distance to each other: 1. the migration of modernist housing projects from Casablanca (Morocco) to Be’er Sheva (Israel) during the period of decolonization and the exodus to Israel; 2. the question of the modern regional in architecture discourses around MARG and CIAM, the architectural and networking practices of Minnette de Silva and the production of feminist spatiality in the context of Chandigarh; 3. a multi-perspective investigation on the relationship of the local to modernist architecture in China in the context of Margarete Schütte Lihotzky's trip to China in 1956, Hsia Changshi's subtropical architecture and the "walking on two legs" campaign of the early 1960s. Questions of embodied difference and nonhuman actors traverse these spaces and expand the concept of transculturality towards dis/ability, posthumanism, and animal studies. (3,4 ) The question regarding the continuities and discontinuities of colonialism and postcolonialism is at the center of each of the individual research interests. (5)

Different empirical data and artifacts, from historical documents to interviews with experts, to photographs, films, research studies, and artistic productions, are placed in a jointly developed system of references by the individual researchers.
This process, which we call mapping, is represented on a web platform especially developed for this purpose. Mapping is a strategy that has become important in artistic practice in the past years to enable decentralized and collaborative forms of knowledge production. (6) The linking of different empirical data in Model House allows capturing the migration of people, concepts, practices, and discourses, and analyzing and visualizing connections, influences, and encounters, as well as political and cultural events. The digital database is thus a crucial part of the project, because it not only represents and produces the network of various actors and their relationships between each other, but also visualizes the research process itself. In this manner, the exchange between researchers at different places and from different disciplines, as well as the participation of nonacademic experts and the integration of a multiplicity of text forms, media, and aesthetic practices are enabled and intensified. The result of this constellation is a polylogical and multiperspectival narration by a number of speakers. They simultaneously establish dialogical relations between specific places and times and thus create chronotopical forms of narration in the sense of Bakthin. (7)

As early as a year after the project began, existing scientific and artistic research as well as initial insights were already linked. The collected data and findings are examined in regard to their common features and differences. By means of this constellation, the “subjectivized” data can be continuously condensed and expanded in a new “topography of interests” by the team and by building up a network of correspondents in Israel, India, and China. (8) This, in turn, should lead to new text and narrative forms as well as experimental aesthetic artistic productions that can go beyond the analysis of the data material, its content-related links and the resulting propositions. The potentials of the dialogical method do not primarily reside in the publication of information but in the artistic-tactical possibilities of including underrepresented relationships between actors as well as diverse vectors of transnational transfers and localizations in the representation. In the sense of Dipesh Chakrabarty, this means making the project of modernism describable from the perspective of a series of localized events and specific actors, instead of continuing to tread the heroic path of universalism. (9)

In his concepts of border thinking, Walter Mignolo additionally points out the necessity of determining the demarcation lines (the borders) of inequality in an exchange (under colonial and postcolonial conditions), which are inherent to the power relations, class differences, or race and gender-specific attributions. These borders can only be identified when taking the asymmetrical encounters into consideration that occur in specific contact zones, as Clifford and Pratt call them. (11,12) Planning, research, government action, and control by the ruling social classes must always also be read in regard to subversion, the struggles, and resistance of marginalized social groups. The resulting conflicts and tensions can thus be grasped as a form of transculturality.

(Translation: Karl Hoffmann)

> transculturalmodernism.org


* “Ma’abarot” is the Hebrew expression for “Transit Camps” where Jewish immigrants from Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Asia were temporary housed in Israel in the 1950s. The painter Marcel Janco, born in Bucharest, was one of the founders of the Dada movement in Zurich before he migrated to Israel in 1940. In Israel he not only dealt with “Transit Camps” and the “New Towns” but also joined the “New Horizons” group, which intended to establish abstraction in the Israeli art scene.

Notes:
1 Cf. Anthony D. King, “Writing Transnational Planning Histories”, in: Joe Nasr/Mercedes Volait (eds.), Urbanism: imported or exported?: native aspirations and foreign plans, Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2003.
2 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.
3 “Dis/ability” is a product of social organization as well as cultural and historical construction. The slash places the focus on the intertwinement of “norm” and “abnormal” and on the construction of “able” and “disabled”. Cf. Rob Imrie, Disability and the City: International Perspectives, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996; or Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, New York: University Press, 2009; or also: Anne Waldschmidt, “Warum und wozu brauchen die Disability Studies die Disability History?”, in: Elsbeth Bösl/Anne Klein/Anne Waldschmidt (eds.), Disability History: Konstruktionen von Behinderung in der Geschichte, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010.
4 The research approach is methodically expanded by concepts such as Bee Modernism (cf. Juan Antonio Ramírez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Gaudí to Le Corbusier, transl. by Alexander R. Tulloch, London: Reaktion Books, 2000) and “Donkey Urbanism”. Donkey Urbanism is a term coined by architecture theorist Catherine Ingraham and refers to the enormous impact that Le Corbusier, in his early works, attributed to the donkey as the real architect of European cities. Cf. Catherine Ingraham, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
5 Cf. T. Avermaete/S. Karakayali/M. von Osten, Colonial Modern. Aesthetics of the Past: Rebellions for the Future, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010.
6 Cf. Labor k3000/Peter Spillmann, “Der kartografische Blick versus Strategien des Mapping”, in: S. Hess/B. Kasparek (eds.), Grenzregime. Diskurse, Praktiken, Institutionen in Europa, Hamburg/Berlin: Assoziation A, 2010.
7 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, http://books.google.com/ books?id=JKZztxqdIpgC The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, transl. by Caryl Emerson/ Michael Holquist, Austin/London: University of Texas, 1981.
8 Cf. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 58
9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who speaks for ‘Indian pasts’”, in: Representations, No. 37, 1992, pp. 1–26.
10 Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Prince- ton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000.
11 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.
12 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992.