Translating the Rural. Wooden Churches, Open-Air Museums and Modern Architecture in Interwar East-Central Europe

Description

Opening: Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 18:00–20:00 Radu Remus Macovei
gta Doctoral Scholarship, ETH Zurich
Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design Symposium: Mediating the Rural. From Ethnography to Design Knowledge
November 9–10, 2026 "To translate" can mean to transfer something from one place to another, to convert it into another material medium, or to translate it from one language to another. These meanings share a common process: something is displaced, transformed, and made readable in a new context. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the emergence of new nation-states in the Carpathian region of East-Central Europe, architecture became a means to transfer rural living environments into national territory and national identity. Open-air museums relocated dozens of rural buildings to cities; planning authorities integrated archaic architectural forms into new, modern villages; ethnographic surveys transformed the diversity of rural cultures into readable categories of the vernacular, folkloric, and national. The exhibition "Translating the Rural" explores these processes by tracing the relocation of three wooden churches from mountain villages to Prague, Bucharest, and Lviv in the context of Czechoslovak, Romanian, and Ukrainian national projects of the interwar period. It presents research findings from Radu Remus Macovei's ongoing doctoral thesis at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), "Moving Churches, Making Nations," as well as from the design research project "Ligneous Worlds," which Macovei developed as part of the Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Both projects examine the mutability of architecture through two interconnected forms of transformation: spatial relocation and adaptation over time. This exhibition was made possible by the Chair of History and Theory of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke; the Chair of Architectural Theory, Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder; the doctoral scholarship of the gta Institute; the mobility scholarship of ETH Zurich; gta exhibitions; and the Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The symposium is supported by a Scientific Exchanges funding contribution from the Swiss National Science Foundation and an Enabling Grant from the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. The exhibition program of gta exhibitions is realized thanks to the Artist-in-Residence program, made possible by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation, Zurich. Image: Edited photograph of the old and new wooden church in the village of Kryvka in the Second Polish Republic (now Ukraine), 1930, just before the dismantling and relocation of the older church to Lviv as part of the Ukrainian national project.