Translating the Rural

To translate can mean to carry something across, to transform it into another material medium or to render it from one language into another. These meanings share an operation: something is displaced, transformed and made legible within a new context.

Architecture makes this operation literal when buildings are physically moved across territories,(i) transformed into another material medium and reinterpreted as carriers of cultural meaning. The exhibition Translating the Rural presents research material resulting from Radu Remus Macovei’s ongoing doctoral research at the gta, Moving Churches, Making Nations, and a design research project, Ligneous Worlds, which Macovei developed through the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Julia A. Appleton Fellowship in Architecture. Together, the two projects examine architectural malleability through two related forms of transformation: physical translation and adaptation through time.
In this context, the exhibition examines translation as a material and political process.

Following the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the emergence of new nation-states across the diverse Carpathian Mountains region of east-central Europe, architecture became a means of translating rural environments into national territory and identity. Open-air museums physically moved tens of rural buildings to cities; planning authorities integrated archaic architectural forms into new, modern villages; and ethnographic surveys transformed diverse rural cultures into legible categories of the vernacular, the folkloric and the national.

The exhibition unpacks these processes by tracing the physical movement of three wooden churches from mountain villages to Prague, Bucharest and Lviv in the context of interwar Czechoslovak, Romanian and Ukrainian national projects.(iii) It follows their transformation from sacred places of worship into national, secularised models through which modern architecture could engage the rural past. These processes both sustained a sense of continuity with that past and projected a modernising future, consolidating the history and identity of a territory into the legible form of a nation. Before their physical translation, the three wooden churches were already architectures ‘in a state of flux’,(iv) changing in response to demographic, economic and technological conditions. Their histories were shaped by additions, substitutions and repairs, enabled by wood's malleability.

Opening: September 23, 2026, 6:00 p.m.