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

Opening: Wednesday, 23 September 2026, 6–8 pm

Radu Remus Macovei
gta Doctoral Fellowship, ETH Zurich
Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Symposium: Mediating the Rural. From Ethnography to Design Knowledge
9–10 November 2026

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. 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 Translating the Rural highlights the physical translation of three wooden churches from mountain villages to capital and regional cities as part of Czechoslovak, Romanian and Ukrainian state formation in the interwar period. It 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 architectural malleability through two related forms of transformation: physical translation and adaptation through time.

This exhibition has been made possible by the Chair for the History and Theory of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke; the Chair for the Theory of Architecture, Prof. Dr. Laurent Stalder; the gta Institute’s Doctoral Fellowship; the Doctoral Mobility Fellowship, ETH Zurich; gta exhibitions and the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship in Architecture. The symposium is supported by a Scientific Exchanges grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation and an Enabling Grant of the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. The exhibition is indebted to the Artist-in-Residence Program made possible by the Thomas and Doris Ammann Foundation, Zurich.

Image: Adapted photograph of the old and new wooden churches from the village of Kryvka in the Second Polish Republic (today in Ukraine), 1930, just before the older church was disassembled and physically translated to Lviv in the context of the Ukrainian national project. Courtesy Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, Ukraine. Graphic design: Teo Schifferli with Pascal Kägi.