My two intentions in this essay are to exemplify a cultural practice that complicates the received notions about modernism’s relation with “non­ Western” countries by using a theoretical framework that I call translation, and to discuss the conceptual distinctions between hybridity and cosmopolitan ethics.2 To accomplish this, I focus on the theoretical writings of the German­ born architect Bruno Taut in Japan and Turkey, and analyze his own house in Istanbul through the lens of these theories.