Mediating the Rural. From Ethnography to Design Knowledge Symposium
Recently, in Switzerland and beyond, many architects have turned to rural environments as sites for testing new ideas, bringing historical and contemporary construction practices into dialogue, and rethinking relations between buildings and landscape. Yet what counts as ‘the rural’ – and how has knowledge of it been produced and used in design? The interdisciplinary symposium “Mediating the Rural: From Ethnography to Design Knowledge” critically examines how rural environments have been made legible through images, texts, objects and institutions, and how these forms of media inform spatial intervention. The reciprocal transfer mechanism between descriptive and prescriptive knowledge of rural environments is a contested site involving architects, researchers, museums, preservationists, local communities, and the material environments they interpret and transform.
The symposium is anchored in Macovei’s doctoral exhibition “Translating the Rural” (gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich, 24.09-04.12.2026) which unpacks the broader relationship between vernacularised and modern rural architecture through case studies of architectural mobility in 20th c. national projects in east-central Europe. Surrounded by the exhibition’s material evidence, the symposium brings together architects, historians, preservationists and ethnographers to explore how villages have been documented, classified, represented, displayed, and rebuilt from the turn of the 20th century to the present.
Symposium: Mediating the Rural. From Ethnography to Design Knowledge
Dates: 9-10 November 2026
Location: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg
More information on the symposium: https://ausstellungen.arch.ethz.ch/en/exhibitions/translating-the-rural-symposium
Official programme: https://ausstellungen.arch.ethz.ch/en/exhibitions/translating-the-rural-symposium
Translating the Rural Exhibition
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. Wooden Churches, Open-Air Museums and Modern Architecture in Interwar East-Central Europe presents material resulting from Radu Remus Macovei’s ongoing doctoral research at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), Moving Churches, Making Nations, and a design research project, Ligneous Worlds, which Macovei developed through the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture. Together, the two projects examine related forms of architectural translation: physical movement and adaptation through time.
Scholars have recently drawn attention to translation’s architectural uses, particularly in relation to the circulation of ideas.(ii) Expanding on this approach, the exhibition examines translation as a material and political process and 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 secularised models of national identity. Architects and engineers formally abstracted and typified these models into rural schemes that both modernised the countryside and allowed modern architecture to engage a distant past. These processes consolidated the history and identity of a territory into the legible form of a nation.
Exhibition: Translating the Rural. Wooden Churches, Open-Air Museums and Modern Architecture in Interwar East-Central Europe
Dates: Thursday, 24 September – Friday, 4 December 2026
Opening: Wednesday, 23 September 2026, 6–8 pm
Location: gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg
Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10 am–6 pm
More information on the exhibition: https://www.ausstellungen.gta.arch.ethz.ch/en/exhibitions/translating-the-rural