This study deals with the early modern furniture of Leopold Bauer from 1900-1903. Much as most of his colleagues from the Wagner school, this artist garnered his first successes not in the field of architecture, but in the arts and crafts. As a member of the radical Art Nouveau generation, which grew up on the theories of Gottfried Semper, he was convinced that the decorative arts were producing determining stimuli for the renewal of the art of building. That is why he conceived furniture design as preparation for the development of a 'useful style' for future modern architecture. In opposition to 19th-century historicism, but also to the fashionable curved lines of Art Nouveau, he required that form should correspond to function and the demands of health as well as with the materials and production techniques used. In his furniture, he first developed a subtle play between matter and emptiness, symmetry and asymmetry and the static and the dynamic. He abandoned this approach shortly thereafter, however, and turned towards voluntary limitation and an elementary expressivity. Instead of rounded lines and open volumes, his furniture took on strictly right-angled, square, compact forms. He took not only contemporary British design as his model, but also Biedermeier, an Austrian and at the same time temperamentally middle-class version of late Classicism. In it, the ideologues of early modernity found the main strengths contemporary furniture was supposed to have - clean, constructive and practical shapes, solid fabrication, respect for materials and sober ornamentation. Bauer's 'simple furniture' was never truly unornamented, however. The obverse of the elementary forms were the refined colour schemes, the expensive materials and the impeccable workmanship, which the architect made use of to create an atmosphere of exceptional luxury and richness of shapes in his interiors. The range of shapes he availed himself of was not merely a response to practical requirements; it also fulfilled a symbolic role. The 'surplus of forms' evident in his furniture served as 'explanatory articulation' (Ernst Hans Gombrich), reinforcing the impression that the pieces he produced were practical, functional and structural-in short, they were supremely modern.
The article presents the topic of Enterprise Risk Management as a modern approach to risk management in an enterprise. In the following study ERM has been treated as a starting point for creating new conceptions of risk management, focusing on using risk as a key factor of an enterprise development. The author points to the role of ERM in the evolution of a different approach to management of whole organization than the one that has been used until now. There has also been outlined the process of creating new organizational culture, focused on a risk as a value driver.
Today's European culture is in crisis caused by many dif erent factors such as globalisation, virtualisation of reality, modernist crisis leading to increasing nihilism, technocracy, hedonism and utilitarian attitudes (consumo ergo sum). The result is the increasing crisis of values and traditional spiritual life. This is particularly visible in the context of the conflict between Christian view of life and the contemporary vision of the world. The aim of the article is analyze this conflict, its causes and impact on life, also in its religious and moral aspect. The 'war of views' is presented in three dimensions. The i rst is the opposition between today's Revelation culture (with its cosmology and the act of the creation) and the New Science that draws false theological conclusions from purely scientii c premises. These conclusions lead to an impersonal and pantheistic idea of God, which is discussed in the second part of the article. In the third part the author focuses on the relationship between this new outlook and today's lifestyle. The article shows dependence of an individual's way of thinking, looking at and experiencing reality on the views he accepts, sometimes unintentionally. He is shaped by today's culture which stands (without any foundation) in the opposition to what opens us to the height of our humanity and which is revealed by God who is Love.
This chapter explores the relationship between the construction of modern self and the social usage of flat image (drawing, photographic picture, painting). Through the long twenty century (from about 1890 up to 2010) in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, individuals produced and shared with others images conveying the knowledge about the new world intruding into local realities. Initially in rural setting, later in cities, image helped people to share with other individual experience but also to create a space where memories about the past can be confronted with social knowledge and integrated into it. Drawings on rural hut walls, paintings on canvas hanged in an urban house living room or images painted as advertisement on walls of shops mediated between individual perception and personal memory on one side and social knowledge on the other. For a century, at the times of discontinuous emergence of the modern self, those images helped to rebuild a social community deprived by colonial and postcolonial self of political rights. The last section of the chapter explores photography by Sammy Baloji for whom image is the tool to remake his society, to reach to the past in order to restore youth’s capacity to build a future denied to them by the present day society.
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