Translating the Rural
Wooden Churches, Open-Air Museums and Modern Architecture in Interwar East-Central Europe
Curated by Radu Remus Macovei and gta exhibitions
Thursday, 24 September – Friday, 4 December 2026
gta exhibitions, ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg
Opening: Wednesday, 23 September 2026, 6–8 pm
Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 10 am–6 pm
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. 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 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. 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 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.
Before their physical translation, the three wooden churches were 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. The project Ligneous Worlds continues to trace these shifting histories and proposes material, tectonic and programmatic transformations that the three buildings might have undergone had they remained in their original locations to the present day. Set in conversation with archival evidence, three 1:5-scale wooden models of the transformed buildings explore these alternative narratives against their preservationist history. They also demonstrate how historical research and design can mutually inform one another: archival evidence becomes a basis for projection, while design makes unrealised architectural possibilities tangible.
Archives
Archives of the National Museum of the Czech Republic (Prague, Czech Republic); Collections of the Ethnographic Museum of the National Museum of the Czech Republic (Terezín, Czech Republic); Czech National Film Archive (Prague, Czech Republic); Dimitrie Gusti National Village Museum (Bucharest, Romania); Romanian National Archives (Bucharest and Baia Mare, Romania); Library of the Romanian Academy (Bucharest, Romania); Romanian National Film Archive (Bucharest, Romania); Archives and Library of the Monuments Board of the Slovak Republic (Bratislava, Slovakia); Archives and Collections of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum (Lviv, Ukraine); Archives of the Museum of Folk Architecture and Life (Lviv, Ukraine); Archives and collections of the ETH Library (Zurich, Switzerland); ETH-Baubibliothek (Zurich, Switzerland); State Archives of Transcarpathia Region (Berehove, Ukraine); State Archives of Lviv Region (Lviv, Ukraine); Urban Media Archive Centre for Urban History (Lviv, Ukraine)
The research presented in this exhibition is indebted to the many scholars and research institutions in the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and Ukraine who have generously shared material from their collections. Radu Remus Macovei would particularly like to thank the Ukrainian researchers and institutions whose ongoing care for their collections, sharing of knowledge and commitment to scholarly work, despite Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine, have made this research possible.
The exhibition includes three interwar wooden church models from Ruthenian-Ukrainian communities in Podkarpatská Rus, Czechoslovakia, generously loaned by the Ethnographic Museum of the National Museum of the Czech Republic.
The physical models resulting from the project Ligneous Worlds were designed by Macovei and fabricated with Tudor Migia and his woodworking workshop in Bucharest, Romania.
Support and advice
Livia Ardelean, Tom Avermaete, Alexandru Baboş, Melinda Bieri, Yustyn Boiko, Martin Bosshard, Alex Bykov, Marián Chrvala, Iuliana Ciotoiu, Irina Davidovici, Maarten Delbeke, Lina Degtyaryova, Katia Denysova, Jaroslav Džoganík, Rareș-Ioan Dina, Nikola Danišová, Noël Fäh, Marta Filipová, Fredi Fischli, Ruxandra Fulger, Petra Gehrmann, Dragoș Ghioca, Klara Guseth, Mina Hava, Karolína Hrichová, Da Hyung Jeong, Nina Irmert, Stepan Kopchak, Ihor Kozhan, Tomas Kowalski, Markus Lähteenmäki, Juliana Maxim, Tudor Migia, Ivana Milenković, Cosmin Minea, Anna Navrotska, Lucie Novotná, Niels Olsen, Oksana Omelchuk, Katka Pařízková, Vitaliia Pastukh, Noelle Paulson, Jan Pohunek, Paulina Popoiu, Cara Rachele, Matthew Rampley, Diana Sava, Teo Schifferli, Julia Secklehner, Vasyl’ Slobodyan, Laurent Stalder, Mykhailo Syrokhman, Mihai Șom, Vasile Țiplea, Theodor Ulieriu-Rostás, Philip Ursprung, Veronica Vasilov, Anca Vitan, Edward Wang, Olha Zarechnyuk, Mykhaylo Zakopets
Team gta exhibitions
Melinda Bieri, Jakob Draz, Ben Frei, Fredi Fischli, Mina Hava, Till Kadler, Margaux Koch Goei, Lucas Lenzin, Ella Mathys, Vitus Michel, Ivana Milenković, Niels Olsen, Sabine Sarwa, Julian Volken
Entrance wall
Melinda Bieri, Ivana Milenković
Graphic design
Teo Schifferli with Pascal Kägi and Dennis Vugts
Proofreading
Jacob Blandy, Ulrike Steiner
Exhibition documentation
Nelly Rodriguez
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.
Extended caption of cover 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.
[i] See Alina Payne, ‘The Portability of Art: Prolegomena to Art and Architecture on the Move’, in Territories and Trajectories: Cultures in Circulation, ed. Diana Sorensen (Duke University Press, 2018), 96; Lucia Allais, ‘Integrities: The Salvage of Abu Simbel’, Grey Room 50 (winter 2013): 6–45; Tim Anstey, Things That Move: A Hinterland in Architectural History (MIT Press, 2024), chapter 3.
[ii] See Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation (Duke University Press, 2012).
[iii] Carpathian wooden churches are community-owned religious buildings associated with Greek Catholic, Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions across the region’s contemporary national borders. Many remain vulnerable today, particularly in Ukraine, where the ongoing Russian war of aggression has damaged or destroyed cultural sites and placed tangible heritage under acute threat. To support protection efforts, the University of Cologne’s 2024 exhibition Holzkirchen in der Ukraine: Vielfalt – Gefahr – Hilfe has recently drawn our attention to the threats wooden churches are experiencing due to the military conflict.
[iv] See Radu Remus Macovei, ‘Buildings in a State of Flux: The Wooden Churches of the Carpathians’, Journal for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism 3 (2022): 241–52.