Journal articles on the topic 'Albero monumentale'

Egresado de la Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería (UNI) el año de 1958. Ingresó al Consejo Nacional de Conservación y Restauración de Monumentos Históricos y Artísticos con el cargo de Arquitecto en el año de 1961. Como Jefe del Departamento Técnico de obras del Consejo de Monumentos y después del Institu- to Nacional de Cultura (INC) efectuó proyectos de estudio, delimitación y declaración de zona monumental en diversas regiones del Perú. Como consultor independiente, desarrolló estudios y proyectos destinados a la protección y restauración de monumentos y ejecución de obras efectuados durante sus 60 años de actividad profesional.

Um breve poema visual de Augusto de Campos que é uma tradução de Maiakóvski dialoga com a monumental série Homenagem ao quadrado, do artista plástico Josef Albers, inspirada, em parte, nas pirâmides e na paisagem mexicanas.

ABSTRACT In Brokeback Mountain, the grand Western tradition's he- roes are deconstructed, and the monumental landscape with its coded promise of freedom and opportunity reduced to the scale of a postcard. Brokeback Mountain transforms into melodrama, albeit with a restrained style that disguises its radical take on an America betraying its original ideals.

In the period 1919–22, two events catalyzed General Motors’ nascent dominance in the automotive industry: the company built a monumental headquarters in Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn Associates and located on what was then the periphery of the city; and a restructuring of the corporation was enacted at the behest of several newly appointed executives, including Alfred P. Sloan. In “Actual Center of Detroit”: Method, Management, and Decentralization in Albert Kahn's General Motors Building, Michael Abrahamson explores the conjunction between these events, arguing that both manifest a struggle with immense size. To cope with the bigness of buildings, corporations, and urban environments, GM and the Kahn firm developed strategies that set the agenda for architectural practice, corporate management, and urban development for the twentieth-century United States. Together, these strategies reveal the entwined forces that influenced the design of the General Motors Building.

Seit 1998 erscheint dieses monumentale, auf zehn Bände geplante etymologische Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen (EWA). Nach anfänglich neun- bis zehnjährigen Phasen (Band 1 bis 3) hat man die Spanne zwischen den Bänden nach 2007 bis um mehr als die Hälfte gekürzt, so dass nun das Ende des 1978 an der University of Pennsylvania von Albert Larry Lloyd und Otto Springer ins Leben gerufenen Projekts fast absehbar ist. Der siebente Band ist – wie seit Band IV – mit einem Verzeichnis der (über 100) Abkürzungen für Sprachen, die mit einbezogen werden, neben vollständigen Angaben zu Quellen und der umfangreichen Forschungsliteratur (S. XX–LIII mit schätzungsweise an die 1.000 Einträgen) bequem benutzbar. Die einzelnen Einträge sind in der Regel mit Kürzel versehen, so dass die Autorin / der Autor leicht zu ermitteln sind.

In little more than a year, between October 1892 and November 1893, the Italian operatic repertory acquired two ambitious and monumental works, similar in their choice of a national–historic subject and in their dramatic form: Alberto Franchetti's Cristoforo Colombo and Ruggero Leoncavallo's I Medici. After a few revivals scattered over several decades, both disappeared from circulation, and recent productions have confirmed doubts about their stageworthiness, notwithstanding some convincing passages (particularly in Colombo) and the enormous investment of intellectual and historical reflection that had attended their birth. Ideological motivations determined the musico-dramatic structures of the two operas, and are closely related to the failure of their projects.

El 25 de mayo de1937 se inauguró en París la Exposition internationale des Arts et des Techniques appliqués à la Vie moderne. Cincuenta naciones fueron representadas. Los pabellones de la Alemania hitleriana y la Rusia estalinista fueron los claros protagonistas. En un contexto de aparente neutralidad, las construcciones de Albert Speer y Boris Iofan ganaron el premio ex aequo como los mejores pabellones de la muestra. Ambos respondían a una misma arquitectura totalitaria y monumental, coronados por simbólicos motivos esculturales. Justo al lado del alemán, discreto y de dimensiones reducidas, la España republicana presentó el que sería llamado como el pabellón de la vanguardia. Todo el díptico Ex aequo (2012-en proceso) contiene un subtítulo con fragmentos de poemas de Federico García Lorca, asesinado durante la Guerra Civil y homenajeado en el pabellón español.

Early in the thirteenth century, probably within the first decade, a treatise on plants was translated from the Arabic by Alfred of Sareshel (or Alveredus Anglicus), which was to become the foundation of the science of botany for the Latin-speaking world. This treatise was until the sixteenth century universally ascribed to Aristotle and awarded all the authority accorded the Philosopher in the other sciences. Within a generation of the appearance of the Latin version the De plantis had become a set text in university curricula and by 1254 was prescribed by statute at the University of Paris as an examination subject. Roger Bacon was lecturing on the text at Paris already in the 1240s and a decade later Albert the Great was composing his monumental and never-to-be-surpassed commentary on the same text.

The last two decades have seen a renewed emphasis on studies falling within the general area of Ritual and Drama. The majority of extant plays have been scrutinised in the search for ritual schemes and sequences, metaphors and allusions remoulded in their imagery and language, and some of the juiciest discussions of Greek theatre have emerged as a result. Nevertheless, compared to this proliferation of studies on particular aspects of ritual symbolism and ritual patterns, few scholars have attempted to investigate the ways in which ritual and theatre can interrelate and unfold in parallel at the level of dramatic plots. Brilliant, albeit isolated, examples of this type of inquiry can be sought in Froma Zeitlin's unequalled pieces on Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae and Euripides' Ion; in the rewarding work of Foley, Segal, Goldhill on the Bacchae as well as in Bowie's ‘ritual’ reading of Aristophanic plots and Seaford's monumental study of Dionysiac patterns in fifth-century Greek tragedy.

The History of Political Ideas by the German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is a monumental work of around 2,600 pages. It remained unpublished during his lifetime, and it came to light through the American edition (1997-1999) and the now completed Portuguese edition (2012-2018). Being the author of the first world edition of an abridged version of the History of Political Ideas ; the translator of the first three volumes of the 2012-2018 Portuguese edition; and the author of The civil philosophy of Eric Voegelin (my 1990 Ph. D diss.) I consider that the History of Political Ideas challenges the present climate of opinion: it subverts the dominant corrosive forces of moral relativism, intolerant neo-positivism, end-of-history obsessions, postmodernist deconstructions, agnosticism, nihilism, new age religions, and the all-pervasive ideology of money. Eric Voegelin achieves all this leading his readers from Antiquity to Modern Age. His monumental work begins with the “spiritual disintegration” of the Greek world, after the peak of Plato and Aristotle, a disintegration that ushered a long process of transition in the self-understanding of man in the Mediterranean world. The series goes through Middle Ages , R enaissance and Reformation as Voegelin analyzes the collapse of imperial Christianity, which led to the rise of autonomous reason and sectarian revolts that reached full development in later centuries. A new form of modern human consciousness replaced the Christian understanding of a divinely created closed cosmos. The collection ends - in a suspensive way - with “The Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man” focused on thinkers such as Comte, Bakunine and Marx; although they experienced true epiphanies, they become self-obsessed to the detriment of the world to which they refer. Such “Apocalypse of Man” must now be challenged, albeit with methodologies and hermeneutic principles other than those that Voegelin himself abandoned some decades ago.

Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions – Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group – represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that was diplomatic – in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities – using means that were cultural – in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or ‘culture’, of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).

Zusammenfassung In early modernity, church historians initially showed little interest in Berthold of Moosburg. They knew him as a commentator of Proclus, but they did not recognise his importance for the history of Neoplatonism. The librarians and bibliographers who came across Berthold’s commentary on Proclus in the Balliol College Library at Oxford showed no interest in the philosophical content of this work. An article on Berthold in the monumental work Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum (1719) summarised the available information. It was Johann Albert Fabricius (1668–1736) who took notice of it. Fabricius was very interested in Proclus as well as in Neoplatonic theology and its narration in the Elements of Theology; he had started to collect all available information regarding this issue and had also come across Berthold’s commentary. However, he did not ignore him, as many had done before, but properly recognised the importance of Berthold for the history of the reception of Proclus’s philosophy. Fabricius always referred to the Dominican thinker when dealing with Proclus’s Elements of Theology, in particular in his own Bibliotheca graeca. One of the attentive readers of this work was the German philologist Friedrich Creuzer. In 1822, within the framework of publishing Neoplatonic writings, Creuzer reedited Proclus’s Elements of Theology. As a consequence of this new edition, Proclus together with his medieval commentator came into the focus of leading representatives of classical German philosophy.

Imperial rule has long been supported by the establishment of monuments. However, in our current climate of tumultuous politics and failing social systems, these monuments occupy increasingly shaky ground. Given a growing crusade against monumental statues the public silence on Michael Parekōwhai’s statue of Captain James Cook in The Lighthouse (Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2017) is deafening. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Captain James Cook is a familiar, albeit divisive, figure. To some, Cook is known as a British navigator, explorer, and cartographer; a founder of nations, friend to natives, with enlightened and scientific motivations. To indigenous communities, Cook was the thief, murderer, and kidnapper who knowingly spread disease when arriving in the Pacific with the intent to find ample land for the British Crown to colonise. This essay explores the significance of the statue of Cook within The Lighthouse, particularly in relation to the legacy of colonial monuments and memorialisation. In The Lighthouse, sculptor Michael Parekōwhai recasts Cook as a complex emblem of personal and collective identity, highlighting issues of place, legacy, and sovereignty. Parekōwhai revises the role of the colonial monument, reclaiming Cook as an instrument in the balancing of historical and national narratives.

<p class="BodyA"><em>I</em><em>n this paper we argue that an educational ideology, based on an epistemology of power and consumerism, has become embedded within the structural foundations of Western Education. The combination of a power-based epistemology which informs curriculum design on the one hand, coupled with a consumerist educational ideology of universal commodification on the other, have served to provide the basis for a persuasive but pernicious philosophy of nature. Virtually every relationship we have with nature, and in turn with each other, is reduced to a saleable item for exchange. The radical shift in socio-cultural perspective which has resulted from what we call an </em><em>“ideo-epistemic pedagogy</em><em>” has been both monumental and inimical to the ostensible goals of environmental education. Motivated by an ideology in which knowledge is construed as a “form of power”, and linked to relentless economic consumption, contemporary environmental education will simply reproduce, albeit in beguilingly inferential ways, the same contextual dynamics of technological invasiveness and mindless expropriation of natural resources that continue to lead ineluctably, and almost imperceptibly to the decimation and degradation of nature.</em></p>

Over the years, as social scientists and economists have become critical of simply using the GNP per capita statistic as the major indicator for the level of development, especially in the case of underdeveloped countries, other more sensitive indicators, which reflect a broader range than does the GNP per capita, have begun to be preferred. One of the most important indicators to replace or supplement the GNP per capita concept is the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) statistic. The importance of this indicator as a reflector of the level of development is further enhanced when one considers the fact that it was one of the three indicators chosen by Morris (1979) for his monumental Physical Quality of Ufe Index. Thus, the careful observation over time of the IMR is an important, albeit still crude, sign for the way a country is progressing. And given this importance, it becomes one of the main targets which needs to be addressed by policy-makers. However, before one is able to implement measures that bring this rate down, i.e., pushing the 'policy package', it is necessary to study carefully the actual causes that result in the high rate. Seeking tlxplanations for a high level of infant mortality, thus, becomes an important objective. The paper by Sathar (1987) is an attempt to do so.

Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005) is a monumental exhibition catalogue showcasing the work of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Together the partners established a renowned daguerreotype studio in mid-nineteenth-century Boston that catered to the city’s bourgeoisie. This paper seeks to unravel the mystery of dozens of daguerreotypes found in Young America, in which elite Boston women appear to be nearly nude. The unidentified women stand in stark contrast to the carefully concealed bodies of Southworth & Hawes’ other female subjects. Why would they expose themselves in such a manner before the camera’s lens? This paper attributes the women’s state of (un)dress to their deliberate emulation of two sculptures in the classical tradition: Clytie, a marble bust dating to antiquity, and Proserpine, a mid-nineteenth-century marble bust by American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers. This argument first reveals how a general “classical statue” aesthetic prevailed for women’s deportment in antebellum America, then demonstrates that the busts of Clytie and Proserpine had special significance as icons of white, elite female beauty in the period. Next, this paper makes the case that Southworth & Hawes devised a special style of photography deriving from their own daguerreotypes of the two statues, in which the women’s off-shoulder drapery was deliberately obscured allowing their female clientele to pose in the guise of these famous statues. The paper concludes by arguing that the women shown in these images could pose in this style without contravening societal norms, as these mythological figures were construed by women and men in the period to reflect the central precepts of the mid-nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Moreover, the busts offered sartorial models that reinforced standards of female dress as they related to class and privilege. By baring their flawless, white skin, however, the women positioned themselves at the crux of contentious beliefs about race in a deeply divided nation prior to the American Civil War.

Conservation techniques within the framework of structural health monitoring, particularly through dynamic measurements and operational modal analysis, are becoming popular for condition-based maintenance and decision-making in historic structures. Nonetheless, while effective for giving insight into the overall behaviour of structures, these techniques may fail at detecting local damages with limited effects on the modal features of the system. In this regard, the analysis of propagating waves throughout the structure poses an attractive alternative for data-driven damage identification. Specifically, some encouraging results have been reported on the application of seismic interferometry to reinforced concrete structures, albeit the number of works concerning ambient vibrations is far scarce, and practically nonexistent in the realm of historic structures. In this light, this article explores the synergistic application of operational modal analysis and ambient noise deconvolution interferometry for the structural identification of historic structures through three different case studies, namely the Sciri Tower in Perugia, the Consoli Palace in Gubbio and the bell-tower of the Basilica of San Pietro in Perugia. The first case study represents a typical example of a masonry tower inserted into a building aggregate, while the second one constitutes a particular case of a monumental masonry palace. The presented results and discussion cover diverse aspects of the identification of wave velocities, signal processing strategies, effects of dispersion and robustness of the identification. Finally, the case study of the bell-tower of the Basilica of San Pietro illustrates the application of operational modal analysis and deconvolution interferometry for damage identification. To do so, two different ambient vibration tests conducted before and after the 2016 Central Italy seismic sequence are studied. The results show concentrated reductions in the wave velocities in the area of the belfry, which demonstrates that deconvolution interferometry constitutes a complementary technique to operational modal analysis for damage localization and, to some extent, damage quantification.

Notarial signs serving to authenticate private and public legal documents emerged in Dalmatia during the 12th century, and by the late Middle Ages they had become a mandatory part of official documents written on parchment for the legal parties. These signs were graphic as a rule: more or less elaborate drawings with decorative motifs, occasionally with integrated typography, yet without any figural elements. Among the very diverse forms of notarial signs preserved in Croatian archives, that of Split’s canon and Zadar’s notary Helias deserves special attention: instead of using a simple graphic symbol, he depicted a young man’s torso, which for several reasons may be presumed to be his self-portrait. More than fifty notarial signs by Helias have been preserved, but it may be presumed that he produced more than a thousand during more than two decades of his career as a notary. These signs are drawing of very small dimensions (3 x 1.5 cm on the average) and most probably not a result of “artistic” ambition, presuming that such terminology applies at all to the visual production of the time. As many other literate men, Helias probably indulged in drawing and incorporated some of this inclination and skill into his work in a peculiar manner. Over the period of two decades, the depicted figure went through several transformations. Starting from a relatively realistic and quite detailed depiction, in the second phase Helias simplified the drawing and enhanced its elements of caricature, ending with a partially stylized and unified version of his sign. Generally speaking, his drawings were closer to the genre of caricature than an official visual representation, which is why he could style them rather freely as compared to the norms that could be observed in the professional circles, especially in the monumental painting of the 14th century. Despite the fact that they seem somehow timeless, their visual features indicate certain knowledge of the formal language of representative painting. Helias’s skilful handling of lines and the ease with which he used a minimum of expressive devices to outline not only the portrait itself, but also the psychological characteristics of the depicted person, are basically a legacy of Gothic visual culture. Self-portrait as a form, albeit absent at least declaratively from medieval monumental painting, was nevertheless present, even if quite rarely and only in isolated cases, in medieval miniature painting (e.g. the self-portraits of St. Dunstan, the notary Vigil, the painter Hildebertus and his assistant Everwinusa, friar Rufillus, the nun Gude, the miniature painter Matthew Paris, or the illuminator Richard de Montbaston and his wife Jeanne). Nevertheless, the paucity of such examples, as well as the spatial and temporal (partly also cultural) distance, makes it difficult to assess the place of Helias’s self-portraits within a broader context. In any case, the group of some fifty portraits from the 14th century, regardless of their dimensions and character, is certainly a peculiar phenomenon in the context of European visual culture. The key point is thereby not the artistic quality of the drawings, but rather the variety of visual communication in 14th-century Dalmatia.

The article raises questions about the role and place of women in medieval society and the artistic space. The possibilities for realizing the artistic potential of female artists and female sculptors are explored. The historiography of the outlined problem is analyzed. It is noted that the main obstacles to full creative self-realization of the female artists were numerous social stereotypes, limited access to professional artistic education and artistic practice, lack of social and economic independence, social discrimination and harassment in the process of becoming part of the androcentric professional elite. An example of an analysis of the way of life and the creative work of the first famous sculpture woman of the Renaissance Properzia de Rossi era demonstrated the intolerance of the medieval society and the artistic community to the possibility of self-realization of the medieval female artist as a sculptor. The main source for research is the monumental work of the Italian architect, theorist and first historian of art, Giorgio Vasari, «The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects». Propperzia de Rossi is one of the four female artists whom Vasari is paying attention in his stories. The author of the article has shown that Vasari belted the biography of Propercia de Rossi, as he strengthened his contemptuous attitude to the mistress. Vasari used the life and work of de Rossi as an example of the fact that all women, albeit very talented and capable of creating interesting work, are not in a position to escape certain female character traits in their writings. Finally, Vasari recognizes the talent of Properzia de Rossi and states the lack of understanding and worthy support from the contemporary society. At the end of the article, the author concludes on the urgent need for a critical analysis of the rather tendentious present-day presentation of the history of the arts and the need to revisit previously unobserved gender aspects in canonical Western-European art.

Около 150 древних поселений разной величины, зарегистрированных в низовьях старой дельты реки Мургаб на юге Туркменистана и датированных периодами средней и поздней бронзы, а также несколько синхронных памятников, обнаруженных в приамударьинских районах на севере Афганистана и на юге Узбекистана, дали впечатляющий материал для новой версии начала истории архитектуры этого региона мира. Все найденные поселения принадлежат Бактрийско-маргианскому археологическому комплексу (БМАК), часто именуемому также «Цивилизацией Окса», и входили в состав микрооазисов - так называемых номов, если следовать месопотамской традиции. В некоторых из них присутствуют явные признаки административных и культовых центров, резко контрастирующих с окружающей бытовой застройкой. Археологи, открывшие и раскопавшие эти объекты, наметили векторы влияний и обозначили процесс эволюции местной строительной практики. Была также предпринята попытка выявить заимствования из протоиндийской цивилизации, Месопотамии и сиро-анатолийского мира. Уточнялась степень проникновения элементов БМАК в античную и средневековую архитектуру Ирана и Центральной Азии. Тем не менее вопросов здесь больше, чем ответов. В статье представлен обзор изученных сооружений, позволяющий увидеть вероятные истоки основных архитектурно-планировочных принципов, распространенных на означенной территории в доахеменидский период. Генезис БМАК - тема дискуссионная, и пока можно лишь предполагать, кем были носители этой бесписьменной культуры, откуда они пришли, какие образы служили эталонами в их строительной деятельности. Как бы то ни было, мы имеем большой фактический материал, который слабо представлен в историографии архитектуры Древнего мира и должен быть рассмотрен в техническом, функциональном и социальном аспектах. Попытка наметить контуры такого исследования, решающего проблемы интерпретации остатков монументальной архитектуры, предпринята в настоящей статье. Самобытность бактрийско-маргианской архитектуры определяет совершенно новый тип сооружений, которого не было прежде. Это «крепости», чьи планировочные схемы в виде квадрата или прямоугольника с прямоугольными или круглыми башнями на углах и по периметру стен, а также с круглым планом отличаются от более ранних энеолитических структур четким построением геометрических форм, стремлением придерживаться правил симметрии. Такие схемы получили самое широкое распространение несколько веков спустя, когда другие уникальные формы материальной культуры БМАК (керамика, глиптика, мелкая пластика и др.) были совершенно забыты. И только в архитектуре последующих эпох - от восточного эллинизма до вернакуляра XIX в. - продолжал воспроизводиться древний фортификационный канон. Все упомянутые в статье памятники наглядно свидетельствуют о зарождении монументальности в архитектуре раннеземледельческих цивилизаций, оказавшихся на периферии древневосточного мира и не знавших прежде ни такой масштабности, ни такого геометризма. Это стало возможным в результате глубоких изменений в социальной жизни местных сообществ, которые накопили материальные ресурсы и идеологический капитал для осуществления беспрецедентных по объему строек. Монументальность как формальное свойство элитных резиденций и религиозных зданий стала выражением культурной мутации, происходившей в процессе включения Бактрии и Маргианы в обширную сеть межрегиональных контактов. Репрезентативная архитектура БМАК была самобытной новацией на рубеже III-II тысячелетий до н. э. и сошла со сцены, оставив после себя угасшие храмы, которые сменились укрепленными сооружениями дворцового типа. Сама эта цивилизация исчезла, когда единство условий, предопределявших ее существование, было нарушено. Жречество как особая каста частично потеряло свое прежнее высокое положение, хотя явно привнесло старую символику и традиции в преемственный цикл развития монументальной архитектуры Центральной Азии в раннем железном веке и значительно позже. About 150 ancient settlements of different sizes, recorded in the lower reaches of the old delta of the Murgab River in southern Turkmenistan and dated to middle and late Bronze Age, as well as several contemporaneous monuments found in the Amur-Darya regions in northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan, supplied impressive material for the new version of the beginning of the history of architecture in this region of the world. All the settlements found belong to the Bactrian-Margiana archeological complex (BMAK), often also called the Oxis Civilization, and were part of the micro-oases, the so-called noms, according to the Mesopotamian tradition. In some of them there are clear traces of administrative and religious centers, in sharp contrast to the surrounding residential buildings. Archaeologists who discovered and excavated these objects, outlined the vectors of influence and outlined the process of evolution of local construction practices. An attempt was also made to uncover borrowings from the Indus Civilization, Mesopotamia and the Syro-Anatolian world. The degree of penetration of the elements of the BMAK into the ancient and medieval architecture of Iran and Central Asia was clarified. However, there are more questions than answers. The article presents an overview of the structures studied, which makes it possible to see the likely origins of the main architectural and planning principles prevalent in the designated area in the pre-Achaemenid period. The genesis of the BMAC is a debatable topic and so far one can only guess who the bearers of this pre-writing culture were, where they came from, what images served as benchmarks in their construction activities. Albeit, we have a large amount of factual material that is poorly represented in the historiography of the architecture of the Ancient World and must be considered in technical, functional and social aspects. An attempt to outline the contours of such a study, which solves the problems of interpreting the remnants of the monumental architecture, has been made in this article. The originality of the Bactrian-Margiana architecture defines a completely new type of structure, which was not there before. These are “fortresses” whose planning schemes in the form of a square or rectangle with rectangular or round towers at the corners and along the perimeter of the walls, as well as with a circular plan, differ from the earlier Eneolithic structures by the precise construction of geometric forms, by the desire to adhere to the rules of symmetry. Such schemes became most widespread a few centuries later, when other unique forms of BMAK material culture (ceramics, glyptics, small works of plastic art, etc.) were completely forgotten. And only in the architecture of the subsequent epochs - from Eastern Hellenism to Vernacular of the 19th century did the ancient fortification canon continue to be reproduced. All the monuments mentioned in the article clearly indicate the origin of monumentality in the architecture of early agricultural civilizations that turned out to be on the periphery of the ancient Eastern world and did not know any such scale and such geometricism before. This became possible as a result of profound changes in the social life of local communities, which have accumulated material resources and ideological capital for the implementation of unprecedented construction projects. Monumentality as a formal property of elite residences and religious buildings became an expression of a cultural mutation that occurred in the process of incorporating Bactria and Margiana into an extensive network of interregional contacts. The representative architecture of the BMAK was a distinctive innovation at the turn of the III-II millennia BC and left the stage, leaving behind the dead temples, which were replaced by fortified palace buildings. This civilization itself disappeared when the unity of the conditions predetermining its existence was disrupted. The priesthood as a special caste partially lost its former high position, although it clearly introduced the old symbolism and traditions into the successive developmental cycle of the monumental architecture of Central Asia in the early Iron Age and much later.

How the Grundtvig Society was foundedA paper read by Henning Høirup to the Annual Conference of the GS on 15th January 1988This paper was given close to the fortieth anniversary of the date when the GS made itself known to the public with a press notice announcing its foundation at a meeting, held at Vartov on 13th January 1948 when the Society was formally constituted. The notice includes the names of the fifteen founder members. The reason why the GS has nevertheless insisted on 8th September 1947 as the date of its foundation is given by Bishop Høirup in this paper. The latter date is the correct one, and the place where the GS was founded is the episcopal residence at Ribe, but the six founders (who had come together at a meeting of Grundtvig scholars) agreed to widen the circle so as to include nine co-founders who were present at the meeting on 13th January 1948.Concurring with Albeck Høirup maintains that the renewed interest in Grundtvig began in the Thirties when the literary historian Georg Christensen had completed Svend Grundtvig’s edition of his father’s Poetiske Skrifter, which had come to a standstill after the Editor’s death in 1889. Approximately at the same time the Haandbog i N. F. S. Grundtvig’s Skrifier by Ernst J. Borup and Fr. Schrøder was published. It was also the time of appearance of Edvard Lehmann’s book on Grundtvig in Swedish with a Danish version following later on. All this occured about ten years earlier than the so-called Grundtvig Renaissance launched by Hal Kochs university lectures on Grundtvig in 1940.However, to Høirup the most important event in the Thirties was the appearance of the eleventh edition of the song-book of the folk high school with the scores for tunes by Carl Nielsen, Thomas Laub and Thorvald Aagaard, which gave new life to Grundtvig’s songs and hymns. Høirup’s pastor colleague of the adjacent parish in Funen, Kaj Thaning at Asperup, had started a card index on main concepts in Grundtvig’s work, and the two clerics got permission to take out Grundtvig mss. on loan pledging that they would keep the invaluable fascicles in the fire-proof safes of their vicarages. Bishop Hans .llgaard of Odense supported research on Grundtvig’s theology as when he convened a working synod of his diocese in 1946, where both Thaning and H.irup presented results of the research projects that led to their doctoral dissertations. At the Royal Library in Copenhagen Høirup met other Grundtvig scholars, Steen Johansen, William Michelsen and Helge Toldberg. In September 1947 those three and Høirup came to Ribe to meet Bishop C. I. Scharling and Villiam Grønbæk, the Diocesan Dean, both known as “High Church” men. But all misgivings about them were soon laid aside. Scharling was able to present his book on “Grundtvig and Romanticism”, that appeared in the same year. At this meeting the idea to set up a society for the advancement of cooperation in research and in the editing of documentary scholarly editions of Grundtvig’s writings was discussed along with a proposal from Bishop Øllgaard that a future yearbook be called Grundtvig-Studier. On the following day, Grundtvig’s birthday, regulations were drafted, just as it was agreed to widen the circle so as to include Bishop Øllgaard and Professor Poul Andersen and Hal Koch, as well as the literary historians Gustav Albeck, Georg Christensen and Magnus Stevns. Helge Toldberg was appointed Secretary and Høirup himself Editor of Grundtvig-Studier. The meeting at Ribe was not convened with the foundation of the GS as its aim. The resolve tofound it grew out of a feeling of the value that working together would entail. The proposed co-founders were all in favour and were joined by Pastor Balslev of Vartov. At the meeting at Vartov, where the Society was constituted, Bishop Scharling was elected President. When he died in 1951, Ernst J. Borup, the Warden of Vartov, rightly said that thanks to Scharling the Society “had been taken beyond the limitations of the partisan dominance to which it might otherwise have been confined.” The circle of co-founders were further augmented with Kaj Thaning and Holger Kjær, a folk high school teacher. An invitation to membership was issued, and at the first annual conference in 1948 the membership stood at 333. At the conference Magnus Stevns lectured on “The Kingo Hymn and Grundtvig”, though he was already hampered by the disease that was to bring him to his grave shortly afterwards.After some remarks about the activities of the Society over the past forty years Høirup pointed out that new scholars constantly have come forward including undergraduates, as those who wrote most of the chapters in the book “For the Sake of Continuity” (1977), which was published as a double-volume of Grundtvig Studier.The 1988 volume of Grundtvig Studier opens with an obituary on P. G. Lindhardt. He was a professor of ecclesiastical history in the University of Aarhus and a member of the Committee of the GS from 1956. He is the author of a biography of Grundtvig in English and contributed an article “Some Light Thrown on Grundtvig’s Trip to England in 1843” to Kirkehistoriske Samlinger 1972. He made an edition of Grundtvig’s sermons 1854-56 with a commentary (1974-1977). His monumental scholarly work was chiefly concerned with the rise of the revivalist movements in the 19th century. The obituarist is J. H . Schjørring, D.D ., who was elected a member of the Commitee of the GS in 1988.The Grundtvig Manuscript .Fragen aus Dänemark an die Universitäten Deutscher Zunge., an unpublished fragment lodged in the Grundtvig Archives of the Royal Library in Copenhagen (fasc. 168), dates from the period 1816-1820. It contains an appeal to the professors of German universities that they offer themselves to the German princes as intermediaries between these and their subjects in setting up constitutional rules of government after the Vienna Conference 1815-1816. As the situation changed, when the writer August von Kotzebue was murdered on 23. March 1819, the manuscript was probably written shortly before this date.

Medieval Dubrovnik was rich in Romanesque figural and decorative sculpture but only a small group of fragmentary carvings has been preserved to date due to the fact that the town suffered a devastating earthquake in 1667. The earthquake completely destroyed the monumental Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin which had been considered “la piu bella in Illyrico” on the basis of its sculptural abundance. Archaeological excavations undertaken beneath the present-day Baroque Cathedral, consecrated in 1713, unearthed several thousand fragments of high-quality sculptures. Their analysis has confirmed the close connections between Dubrovnik and artistic centres in Apulia, which are well known from archival records. This article re-assesses the results of the excavations and the information from the primary sources in a new light and deepens our knowledge about the date, authorship and reconstruction of the thireenth-century pieces under consideration.The article opens with a discussion about the archival record informing us that Eustasius of Trani came to Dubrovnik in 1199 to work as a protomagister of Dubrovnik Cathedral. The document in question was the reason why art historians attributed to him a number of rather damaged, narrative reliefs which replicate the models and forms that can be seen on the portal of Trani Cathedral. Since the sculptor responsible for that portal was not known and given that the contract preserved in Dubrovnik referred to Eustasius as a son of “Belnardi, protomagistri civitati Trani”, the two artists came to be considered as the builders of the Cathedral of S. Nicola Pellegrino at Trani and of several other churches in the Terra di Bari. The sculptures produced by Eustasius and his father were convincingly deemed to display the artistic influence of southern and central France and the same can be observed in Dubrovnik. The article assigns the figure of Christ the Judge from a portal lunette depicting the Last Judgement, which has no parallels in Apulia, to the same group of sculptures and interprets the subject matter as being inspired by the iconography of numerous pilgrimage churches to which Dubrovnik Cathedral also belonged. The assessment of the formal qualities evident in all the carvings demonstrates that they are less refined than those on the portal of Trani Cathedral. Furthermore, the article separates the works of the father from those of the son and suggests that Bolnardus introduced the aforementioned French-style carving method, which had already taken root in Palestine, and that Eustasius followed it. The starting point in the proposed chronology was the Fall of Jerusalem in 1187 and the associated withdrawal of western master carvers alongside the Crusaders. During their stopover at Trani, around 1190, Boltranius was in charge of the carving of the portal of Trani Cathedral where he was helped by his son who left for Dubrovnik in 1199. Based on the visual characteristics of the fragments of architectural decoration, Eustasius is identified as being responsible for the building of Dubrovnik Cathedral according to Apulian taste which appealed to the local patrons as a consequence of their constant exposure to it through numerous trade links and the overall cultural milieu. In fact, Apulian taste was a symbiosis of Byzantine traditions and Romanesque novelties introduced by the Normans, and its allure was grounded in the fact that both the Terra di Bari and Dubrovnik acknowledged the supreme power of these two political forces albeit not at the same time and in unequal measure.The vernacular current in the Romanesque sculpture of Dubrovnik during the second quarter of the thirteenth century can be noted in a small number of works which influenced the decoration of Gothic and Renaissance public buildings. The source of this diffusion can be identified in the decoration of the Cathedral which epitomized the strong artistic connections with southern Italy from where typological and morphological models were borrowed. The redecoration of the Cathedral’s interior, especially the pulpit – recorded for the first time in 1262 – the archaeological remains of which reveal a polygonal structure resting on twelve columns, drew on those very models. Together with the ciborium above the altar in the main apse, the pulpit was praised by local chroniclers and foreign travel writers during the fifteenth century but also by the earliest church visitation records of the mid-seventeenth century. These two monuments belonged to a group of standard Apulian-Dalmatian ciboria and pulpits which also included those that can today be seen in the cathedrals of Trogir and Split but also in many south Italian churches. Some scholars have argued that the source model for this group can be found in Jerusalem but this article suggests that the ciborium from the church of S. Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome, dated to 1148, presents a more likely option. Particular attention is given to the naturalistic workmanship of a polygonal capital from Dubrovnik Cathedral, which is assigned to the aforementioned pulpit. It is argued that the style of the capital inspired a series of capitals carved à jour on both sides of the Adriatic and that they display characteristics consistent with the manner of carving of Pietro di Facitolo seen at Bisceglie. The exceptional workmanship of the eagle from the same pulpit is attributed to Pasquo di Pietro who was recorded as a protomagister of the Cathedral from 1255 to 1282 and who well regarded as a master carver. His good reputation earned him the citizenship and an estate; he and his son were mentioned in the local documents as “de Ragusio”. The author of the article hypothesizes that Pasquo may have been Pietro di Facitolo’s son, with which he concludes the outline of the sculptural development of the Apulian Romanesque in Dubrovnik and Dalmatia in general.The final part of the article focuses on the only known work of Simeonus Ragusinus who signed himself as “incola tranensis” on the portal of the church of S. Andrea, that is, S. Salvatore at Barletta. The hybrid artistic expression of this eclectic sculptor with a limited gift, who gathered his knowledge from a variety of sources, reveals that he may have borrowed some iconographic motifs from Eustasius’ portal of Dubrovnik Cathedral or from the other two portals. Overall, the article corroborates several hypotheses that were previously expressed in the scholarship while dismissing and rerouting others. At the same time, it emphasizes the scarcity of solid evidence because of the fragmentary nature of the material. The main goal of the article is to present new research findings and widen our perspective on the issue. The article is a revised version of a brief paper presented at the international conference “Master Buvina and his Time” which was held at Split in 2014 and which will be published in a foreign language. I hope that with the addition of new comments and the scholarly apparatus the article will be a useful point of reference to Croatian researchers of similar topics and that it will contribute towards the creation of syntheses about the medieval art in the Adriatic.

AbstractTwo things long stood in the way of the erection of statues in public in the Northern Netherlands, on the one hand the lack of a strong central government and on the other the wrongly interpreted - Calvinist interdict on them (Note 1). The first statue of this kind, that of Erasmus in Rotterdam by De Keyser (1622), was attacked by strict Calvinists, but noted throughout Europe as an early paradigm (Note 3). Not until the 19th century did the Netherlands join in the nationalistic 'statue craze', which was just breaking out then, with two monuments to the supposed Dutch inventor of printing, Laurens Janszoon Coster. These statues of a private citizen had a predecessor in the 18th century, while a statue had already been demanded in the 17th-century eulogies of Coster. Cities had long honoured their famous inventors as important contributors to civilization and praise of the inventor was also a fundampental ingredient of the history of learning (e.g. in Pliny). In the Renaissance scientific inventions acquired a special emphasis, modern inventors being held up as evidence that the model of Antiquity could be not only equalled, but also surpassed, while both Christian civilization and the northern countries could also gain credit here (cf. Johannes Stradanus, Figs. 2, 3, Note 9, and Francis Bacon, Note 10). The significance of the invention of printing for Christianity was soon recognized, so that it was lauded above other inventions as 'divine', an attitude that was certainly also strengthened by its decisive role in the Reformation. In the Netherlands in particular, where religious and political developments were so closely interwoven, printing was regarded as an important aid to both (Notes 14, 15), while the young Dutch Republic, in which printing played such an important part, could claim the honour of counting the inventor of this important art among its citizens. This 'pious fraud' (Hellinga) is fundamental to the discussion of the history of the statues. The Coster tradition can only be traced back to about a century after the supposed invention, acquiring its definitive form at the end of the 16th century in Hadrianus Junius' Batavia Illustrata of 1598. The further enlargement on the merits of Coster also necessitated a portrait of him which, in de fault of an authentic one, had to be fabricated for the purpose, the features of the statue of Erasmus being taken over for a full-length portrait (Fig. 5), which served as a 'graphic monument'. A fictitious bust of Coster was also cited in the 17th century (Fig. 7) and this, like the early sculptural marks of honour to him (Fig. 16), belongs to the iconography of printing, the practitioners of the craft evoking their inventor. Such representations - a more or less life-size statue of Coster is still to be seen on the house of the Haarlem printer Enschedé - were not yet very public in character. The statue of Coster projected from the end of the 17th century for the garden of the Hortus Medicus in Haarlem did acquire greater publicity, however. This humanist garden of a bourgeois learned society (Note 28), reflected not only nature, but also the world of learning, as a microcosm of the arts, with sixteen busts of connoisseurs and scholars under the leadership of a full-length statue of Coster, since it was he who by his art had made the dissemination of learning possible, although he owed his place here largely to his Haarlem origins, of course. The designs made by Romeyn de Hooghe for this statue (Note 29) were only realized in 1722 in a statue by Gerrit van Heerstal, which tried to unite historical and classical features (Figs. 8-13). In the years thereafter, up to the tercentenary of the invention, the poems, medals and a weighty commemorative publication (Fig. 14, Note 35) celebrating the Haarlem inventor of printing all referred to this statue in his birthplace. Meanwhile Germany too had honoured her inventors of printing - Fust in addition to Gutenberg, initially - in 1640 and 1710 by centenary festivities often of a Protestant cast. Privileges relating to public statues may have been one of the reasons why no monuments were erected on these occasions. These privileges were, however, annulled by the French Revolution, just as the Enlightenment and political renewal furthered the cult of honouring leading civic 'geniuses'. Two Gutenberg cities under French rule took pride of pace here, but only in 1840 did Strasbourg acquire a statue of Gutenberg by David d'Angers, which illustrated his role as the enlightener of all mankind (Figs. 15-18, Note 39). In Mainz a private initiative of 1794 came to nothing (Note 40), as did a Napoleonic rebuilding plan centred on a Gutenberg Square with a statue. Not until 1829 was a semi-public statue by Joseph Stok set up there (Note 41), while in 1837 the Gutenberg monument designed by Bartel Thorwaldsen was unveiled with great ceremony (Fig. 19). The two last-mentioned statues in Mainz, like the many others erected after 1814, were the products of the nationalistic pride in the country's past history that flared up after the defeat of Napoleon. This pride in the past generally took on a nostalgic cast and served to compensate for the failure of current political ambitions: The unity of Germany long a dream, while the hoped-for great changes in the Kingdom of the Netherlands were dealt a bitter blow by the breakaway of the 'southern provinces' in 1831 (Note 44). This last event marked the start for the Northern Netherlands of a long-lasting rivalry with their Belgian neighbours, which was pursued by means of monumental art, from the statue of Rembrandt (1852) as an answer to that of Rubens (1840) to the Rijksmuseum (1885). The great importance attached to Coster in the 19th century was already manifested in 1801 by the removal of the statue in Haarlem from the Hortus Medicus to the marketplace (Note 45). National pride is abundantly evident in the prizewinning treatise published in 1816 by Jacobus Koning, who is a weighty investigation confirmed Coster's right to the invention and with it that of the Netherlands to a leading place among the civilized nations. The quatercentenary, fixed surprisingly early, in 1823, comprised every imaginable type of public entertainment and demonstration of scholarship. It is, however, striking that these expressions of national pride were still balanced by references to the elevating effect of the invention (Note 56). The most lasting mark of honour of the celebration of 1823, the abstract monument by the Haarlem sculptor D. Douglas, also looked back to the sensibilities of the 18th century in its placing on the spot where the invention had come into being in the Haarlem Wood (Fig. 23, Note 59). After this Haarlem monument of 1823 had been adduced in the discussions about the statue in Mainz before 1829, Thorwaldsen's statue, which attracted great international attention, became a greater source of annoyance to the Dutch adversaries of Gutenberg after 1829 than the statue to the Belgian inventor Dirck Martens in Aalst (Note 63) or the projected monument to William Caxton in England. Jan Jacob Frederik. Noordziek summed up this dissatisfaction in his call in 1847 to 'uphold the honour of the fatherland', in which he pleaded for a monument that would surpass the Gutenberg statue and thus serve as an argument that would establish the Dutch claim for good (Note 64). The erection of this statue was further expressly intended to be an exclusively national affair: the citizens of the Netherlands must raise the money and only Dutch artists be charged with the execution. The general discussion about the statues appears to have been less virulent than was usually the case in the preliminaries to other monuments (Note 66), Coster's merits evidently being little contested within the country itself. There were two notable critical voices, however (see Appendix). Professor M. Siegenbeek rang the changes on an old Calvinist argument in refusing a seat on the preparatory committee: in addition to the fact that there were certainly more people who deserved statues, he pointed out that the great expense involved merely evinced ostentation and that the money would be better spent on social ends. The Neo-Classicist Humbert de Superville, on the other hand, did express doubts as to Coster's right to the title, repeating aesthetic arguments which had been adduced before: statues ought, in his view, to be made in the form of durable stone herms, but he thought there was as little chance of that in this 'age of modish lay-figures' in the bronze of melted-down coins, as that the statue would be made by a Dutchman (Note 67). A typical Romantic historical controversy threw the organizers into turmoil, namely the authenticity of the representations of Coster. In particular Westreenen van Tielland unmasked the idealizing and forged portraits, arguing against the erection of a historicizing representational statue. But the defenders of Coster's honour opted for the usual historical realism (Note 68). The tenor of these polemics is found again in the conflict over the 'historical or allegorical' nature of the composition, which can be seen in the designs. Louis Royer, to whom the commission was given in 1848, wanted to show Coster walking with a winged letter A in his hand, as if on his way to show people his discovery, which was soon to wing its way round the world (cf. Fig. 22). However, this allegorical element disappeared completely in the final version, in which the choice fell on a realistic portrait, albeit Coster was still shown walking like a classical predecessor, Archimedes, who could not keep his discovery to himself (Fig. 23, Note 69). The architect H. M. Tetar van Elven was commissioned to make a base in the style of 'the last era of the Middle Ages'. The inscriptions also presented problems, but were finally agreed on in September 1855. The ceremonies, which after all manner of altercation between Royer and the main committee (Note 70) and various financial problems, were finally able to be staged from 15 to 17 July) 1856, included, in addition to the actual unveiling of the statue on the marketplace ( Van Heerstal's statue being returned to the garden again) , pageants, meetings, an exhibition and all sorts of popular entertainments. Everything was on a grander and more extensive scale than 33 years before and little remained of the motif of enlightenment through printing which had been so important then. Nalionalistic merry-making now predominated, along with expressions of devotion to the House of Orange. Less emphasis was also given to the 'darkness' of the Middle Ages, which were now beginning to be valued as part of the nation's history. The most monumental homage to this monument was a 360-page account of the events by the indefatigable Noordziek. His dream of the recognition of Coster and the nation as a whole seemed to have become a reality. But it was not to be so for long. Only fifteen years after the unveiling A. van de Linde unmasked the' 'Haarlem Coster legend' and called for the demolition of the statue, again in the interests of the nation (Note 81).

El proyecto de investigación “Parte de la obra de pintura mural de Luis Alberto Acuña” creado por el profesor Diego Carrizosa Posada, indaga mediante el análisis iconográfico la manera en que Luis Alberto Acuña representa plásticamente dentro de su obra mural, temas de utilidad pública, que son el resultado de la influencia recibida del ejercicio pedagógico de la escuela muralista mexicana. De igual manera el proyecto de investigación busca: Conocer las posturas intelectuales y artísticas de Luis Alberto Acuña, mediante entrevistas a historiadores, críticos de arte y familiares del maestro. Analizar las enseñanzas que recibió Luis Alberto Acuña de la escuela muralista mexicana y la manera en que la estética de su plástica influenció su pensamiento y estilo para la concepción de un arte mural monumental con utilidad pública y con capacidad educativa. Examinar mediante el análisis iconográfico la obra de pintura mural monumental de Luis Alberto Acuña que cumple con los objetivos de utilidad pública y de capacidad educativa, que son reflejo de la influencia recibida de la escuela muralista mexicana. Para tal efecto son examinados los murales: “Colón descubre el nuevo mundo” (1959), el cual pertenece al Centro Médico Almirante Colón, “Apoteosis de la lengua castellana” (1960) y “El castellano Imperial” (1960), ambos emplazados en la Academia Colombiana de la Lengua e “Historia de la cultura” (1973), obra localizada en la Imprenta Nacional de Colombia. Este proyecto pertenece al grupo de investigación de la Facultad de Sociedad, Cultura y Creatividad, que se denomina Narrativas, Creación y Estéticas, del cual es responsable el profesor Rodrigo Martínez. Dicho grupo de investigación hace parte de la Escuela de Comunicación, Artes Visuales y Digitales, cuyo director es el profesor Harvey Murcia.

EinleitungIm Zuge des DFG-Projekts erfolgt die Einbindung der gemeinsamen Normdatei (GND) der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek in den OPAC der Bibliothek der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH). Die Grundlage dazu stellen zwei digitalisierte historische Bio-Bibliographien dar, nämlich das „Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis“ des Johannes Trithemius von 1494 und die „Bibliotheca latina mediae et infimae aetatis“ des Johann Albert Fabricius in der Ausgabe von 1858. Die Normdatei wird damit um wichtige neue Einträge mittelalterlicher Autoren, die bis jetzt noch nicht verzeichnet und erfasst wurden, ergänzt.

The Genoese roof structures are characterized by the originality of their construction and technological solutions compared to other cultural and geographical areas, including neighbouring ones, and, in particular, by the unique connection with the underlying wall structures, by their thrusting nature and by the scarce or non-existent presence of trusses. From the second half of the 16th century, in the roofs of large spaces such as churches and assembly halls, the wooden elements of the main roof structure are supported by solid brick pillars resting on arches or the ribs of the underlying vaulted structures. This paper describes the building features, the state of preservation, and the restoration and consolidation project of the roof and the underlying vault with timber ribs and plastered reed mats on the intrados of the Men’s Oratory of the Albergo dei Poveri in Genoa, one of the largest still preserved in the monumental complex and one of the most imposing among those still present in the city.

Over the course of the last 3 decades, the world has seen monumental shifts in how information is collected, transmitted, and disseminated. Every aspect of our personalities that live on the internet, including our browser history, photos we post to social media, our shopping decisions and our selection of online friends, has been collated, quantified, and assimilated into a digital profile, which has skyrocketing value to an increasing number of businesses. With these developments in technology come the inevitable questions of ownership of such data, its use, misuse and even possible theft. This paper takes a comprehensive and comparative look at the data privacy legislature in the two largest data hubs in the world, namely the United States and the European Union. The paper also seeks to address the shortcomings of certain, past legislative decisions, and makes a recommendation for the future. To do this, we analyze the events of the past, using the 2016 Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data scandal as a focal point. On analyzing the major differences between American privacy law and the preeminent document on data privacy at the time, namely the Global Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR), we conclude that data privacy in the United States is in its nascent stages, in dire need of an overhaul. The California Consumer Privacy Act is the legislature that comes close to mimicking the function of the GDPR, albeit at a much smaller scale. The other remedies include the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), which is already under consideration by Congress, or a state-by-state approach.

Abstract Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic placed an unprecedented overload on healthcare system globally. With all medical resources being dedicated to contain the spread of the disease, the pandemic may have impacted the burden of other infectious diseases such as dengue, particularly in countries endemic for dengue fever. Indeed, the co‐occurrence of COVID‐19 made dengue diagnosis challenging because of some shared clinical manifestations between the two pathogens. Furthermore, the sudden emergence and novelty of this global public health crisis has forced the suspension or slow-down of several research trials due to the lack of sufficient knowledge on how to handle the continuity of research trials during the pandemic. We report on challenges we have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and measures that were implemented to continue the iDEM project (intervention for Dengue Epidemiology in Malaysia). Methods This randomized controlled trial aims to assess the effectiveness of Integrated Vector Management (IVM) on the incidence of dengue in urban Malaysia by combining: targeted outdoor residual spraying (TORS), deployment of auto-dissemination devices (ADDs), and active community engagement (CE). Our operational activities started on February 10, 2020, a few weeks before the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Malaysia. Results The three main issues affecting the continuity of the trial were: ensuring the safety of field workers during the interventions; ensuring the planned turnover of TORS application and ADD deployment and services; and maintaining the CE activities as far as possible. Conclusions Even though the pandemic has created monumental challenges, we ensured the safety of field workers by providing complete personal protective equipment and regular COVID-19 testing. Albeit with delay, we maintained the planned interval time between TORS application and ADDs services by overlapping the intervention cycles instead of having them in a sequential scheme. CE activities continued remotely through several channels (e.g., phone calls and text messages). Sustained efforts of the management team, significant involvement of the Malaysian Ministry of Health and a quick and smart adaptation of the trial organisation according to the pandemic situation were the main factors that allowed the successful continuation of our research. Trial registration Trial registration number: ISRCTN-81915073. Date of registration: 17/04/2020, 'Retrospectively registered'.

Domeier, Norman / Christian Mühling (Hrsg.), Homosexualität am Hof. Praktiken und Diskurse vom Mittelalter bis heute (Geschichte und Geschlechter, 74), Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2020, Campus, 401 S. / Abb., € 39,95. (Martin Dinges, Stuttgart) Hengerer, Mark / Nadir Weber (Hrsg.), Animals and Courts. Europe, c. 1200 – 1800, Berlin / Boston 2020, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, VII u. 434 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Stefano Saracino, Jena / München) Baumann, Anette / Alexander Jendorff / Frank Theisen (Hrsg.), Religion – Migration – Integration. Studien zu Wechselwirkungen religiös motivierter Mobilität im vormodernen Europa, Tübingen 2019, Mohr Siebeck, VIII u. 312 S. / € 54,00. (Bettina Braun, Mainz) Dirmeier, Artur / Mark Spoerer (Hrsg.), Spital und Wirtschaft in der Vormoderne. Sozial-karitative Institutionen und ihre Rechnungslegung als Quelle für die Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Studien zur Geschichte des Spital-‍, Wohlfahrts- und Gesundheitswesens, 14), Regensburg 2020, Pustet, 308 S. / Abb., € 34,95. (Peter Rauscher, Wien) Raffa, Guy P., Dante’s Bones. How a Poet Invented Italy, Cambridge / London 2020, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, VIII u. 370 S. / Abb., $ 28,95. (Arne Karsten, Wuppertal) Backes, Martina / Jürgen Dendorf (Hrsg.), Nationales Interesse und ideologischer Missbrauch. Mittelalterforschung in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Vorträge zum 75jährigen Bestehen der Abteilung Landesgeschichte am Historischen Seminar der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Freiburger Beiträge zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 1), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 268 S. / Abb., € 28,00. (Bernd Schneidmüller, Heidelberg) Page, Sophie / Catherine Rider (Hrsg.), The Routledge History of Medieval Magic (Routledge Histories), London / New York 2019, Routledge, XVII u. 550 S. / Abb., £ 175,00. (Rita Voltmer, Trier) Ziegler, Tiffany A., Medieval Healthcare and the Rise of Charitable Institutions. The History of the Municipal Hospital (The New Middle Ages), Cham 2018, Palgrave Macmillan, VI u. 155 S., € 58,84. (Artur Dirmeier, Regensburg) Speich, Heinrich, Burgrecht. Von der Einbürgerung zum politischen Bündnis im Spätmittelalter (Vorträge und Forschungen, Sonderband 59), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 419 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Gabriel Zeilinger, Rostock) Harry, David, Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London. The Common Profit, Charity and Commemoration, Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XI u. 216 S., £ 75,00. (Jens Röhrkasten, Dresden) Carr, Mike, Merchant Crusaders in the Aegean, 1201 – 1352 (Warfare in History), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XII u. 196 S. / Abb., £ 19,99. (Kristjan Toomaspoeg, Lecce) Dokumente zur Geschichte des Deutschen Reiches und seiner Verfassung 1340 – 1343, Bd. 7, Teil 2, bearb. v. Michael Menzel (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, 7.2), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz, XLIV und 404 S., € 120,00. (Andrea Stieldorf, Bonn) Flemmig, Stephan, Zwischen dem Reich und Ostmitteleuropa. Die Beziehungen von Jagiellonen, Wettinern und Deutschem Orden (1386 – 1526) (Quellen und Forschungen zur sächsischen und mitteldeutschen Geschichte, 44), Stuttgart 2019, Steiner, 706 S., € 116,00. (Julia Burkhardt, München) Hagemann, Manuel, Herrschaft und Dienst. Territoriale Amtsträger unter Adolf II. von Kleve (1394 – 1448) (Schriften der Heresbach-Stiftung Kalkar, 17), Bielefeld 2020, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 912 S., € 49,00. (Benjamin Müsegades, Heidelberg) Traxler, Christina, Firmiter velitis resistere. Die Auseinandersetzung der Wiener Universität mit dem Hussitismus vom Konstanzer Konzil (1414 – 1418) bis zum Beginn des Basler Konzils (1431 – 1449) (Schriften des Archivs der Universität Wien, 27), Göttingen 2019, V&amp;R unipress / Vienna University Press, 547 S., € 70,00. (Blanka Zilynská, Prag) Chronik des Konstanzer Konzils 1414 – 1418 von Ulrich Richental. Historisch-kritische Edition, 3 Bde., Bd. 1: A-Version; Bd. 2: K-Version; Bd. 3: G-Version, eingel., komm. u. hrsg. v. Thomas M. Buck (Konstanzer Geschichts- und Rechtsquellen, 49.1 – 3), Ostfildern 2020, Thorbecke, 461 S.; 415 S.; 433 S., € 145,00. (Christof Rolker, Bamberg) Šmahel, František, Die Basler Kompaktaten mit den Hussiten (1436). Untersuchung und Edition (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Studien und Texte, 65), Wiesbaden 2019, Harrassowitz, XXII u. 226 S., € 45,00. 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Zauberei und fingierte Heiligkeit im frühneuzeitlichen Spanien (Hexenforschung, 18), Bielefeld 2019, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 263 S. / Abb., € 29,00. (Sarah Masiak, Detmold) Kamp, Jeannette, Crime, Gender and Social Control in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main (Crime and City in History, 3), Leiden / Boston 2020, Brill, XII u. 335 S. / Abb., € 121,00. (Matthias Schnettger, Mainz) Liapi, Lena, Roguery in Print. Crime and Culture in Early Modern London (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 33), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, IX u. 194 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Birgit Näther, Berlin) Ritsema van Eck, Marianne P., The Holy Land in Observant Franciscan Texts (c. 1480 – 1650). Theology, Travel, and Territoriality (The Medieval Franciscans, 17), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XI u. 260 S. / Abb., € 132,00. (Mirko Breitenstein, Dresden) Bowd, Stephen D., Renaissance Mass Murder. Civilians and Soldiers during the Italian Wars, Oxford / New York 2018, Oxford University Press, X u. 288 S., £ 65,00. (Christian Jaser, Klagenfurt) Schulte, Daniela, Die zerstörte Stadt. Katastrophen in den schweizerischen Bilderchroniken des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Medienwandel – Medienwechsel – Medienwissen, 41), Zürich 2020, Chronos, 246 S. / Abb., € 48,00. (Stephanie Armer, Eichstätt) Deiters, Maria / Ruth Slenczka (Hrsg.), Häuslich – persönlich – innerlich. Bild und Frömmigkeitspraxis im Umfeld der Reformation, Berlin / Boston 2020, de Gruyter, XIV u. 423 S. / Abb., € 99,95. (Gregor Rohmann, Frankfurt a. M.) Christ-von Wedel, Christine, Die Äbtissin, der Söldnerführer und ihre Töchter. Katharina von Zimmern im politischen Spannungsfeld der Reformationszeit, unter Mitarbeit v. Irene Gysel / Jeanne Pestalozzi / Marlis Stähli, Zürich 2019, Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 356 S. / Abb., € 33,90. (Bettina Braun, Mainz) Grochowina, Nicole, Reformation (Seminar Geschichte), Berlin / Boston 2020, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, X u. 220 S. / Abb., € 24,95. (Tobias Jammerthal, Neuendettelsau) Behringer, Wolfgang / Wolfgang Kraus / Roland Marti (Hrsg.), Die Reformation zwischen Revolution und Renaissance. Reflexionen zum Reformationsjubiläum (Kulturelle Grundlagen Europas, 6), Berlin 2019, Lit, 350 S. / Abb., € 39,90. (Martina Fuchs, Wien) Greiling, Werner / Thomas T. Müller / Uwe Schirmer (Hrsg.), Reformation und Bauernkrieg (Quellen und Forschungen zu Thüringen im Zeitalter der Reformation, 12), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2019, Böhlau, 474 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Ulrich Bubenheimer, Reutlingen) Werz, Joachim, Predigtmodi im frühneuzeitlichen Katholizismus. Die volkssprachliche Verkündigung von Leonhard Haller und Georg Scherer in Zeiten von Bedrohungen (1500 – 1605) (Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, 175), Münster 2020, Aschendorff, X u. 606 S. / graph. Darst., € 77,00. (Kai Bremer, Osnabrück) Freitag, Werner / Wilfried Reininghaus (Hrsg.), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Reformation in Westfalen, Bd. 2: Langzeitreformation, Konfessionskultur und Ambiguität in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts. Beiträge der Tagung am 27. und 28. Oktober 2017 in Lemgo (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 47), Münster 2019, Aschendorff, 391 S. / Abb. / CD-ROM, € 44,00. (Andreas Rutz, Dresden) Cordes, Jan-Christian, Politik und Glaube. Die Reformation in der Hansestadt Lüneburg (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 304), Göttingen 2020, Wallstein, 758 S., € 49,00. (Olaf Mörke, Kiel) Hough, Adam G., The Peace of Augsburg and the Meckhart Confession. Moderate Religion in an Age of Militancy (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), New York / London 2019, Routledge, X u. 341 S. / Abb., £ 115,00. (Marion Bechtold-Mayer, Darmstadt) Francisco de Vitoria, De iustitia / Über die Gerechtigkeit, Teil 3, hrsg., eingel. u. ins Deutsche übers. v. Joachim Stüben, mit einer Einleitung v. Tilman Repgen (Politische Philosophie und Rechtstheorie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit. Reihe I: Texte, 5), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2020, Frommann-Holzboog, LI u. 242 S., € 168,00. (Nils Jansen, Münster) Overell, M. Anne, Nicodemites: Faith and Concealment between Italy and Tudor England (St Andrews Studies in Reformation History), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, XII u. 218 S., € 125,00. (Andreas Pietsch, Münster) Schultz, Jenna M., National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552 – 1652 (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 32), Woodbridge 2019, The Boydell Press, XVII u. 326 S. / Karten, £ 70,00. (Iris Fleßenkämper, Münster) Heinemann, Julia, Verwandtsein und Herrschen. Die Königinmutter Catherine de Médicis und ihre Kinder in Briefen 1560 – 1589 (Pariser Historische Studien, 118), Heidelberg 2020, Heidelberg University Publishing, 517 S. / Abb., € 49,90. (Katrin Keller, Wien) Malettke, Klaus, Katharina von Medici. Frankreichs verkannte Königin, Paderborn 2020, Schöningh, VIII u. 403 S. / Abb., € 78,00. (Katrin Keller, Wien) Haar, Christoph Ph., Natural and Political Conceptions of Community. The Role of the Household Society in Early Modern Jesuit Thought, c. 1590 – 1650 (Jesuit Studies, 17), Leiden / Boston 2019, Brill, VI u. 314 S., € 132,00. (Nils Jansen, Münster) Senning, Calvin F., Spain, Rumor, and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Jacobean England. The Palatine Match, Cleves, and the Armada Scares of 1612 – 1613 and 1614 (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), New York / London 2019, Routledge, XI u. 254 S. / Abb., £ 120,00. (Alexander Schunka, Berlin) Saito, Keita, Das Kriegskommissariat der bayerisch-ligistischen Armee während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Herrschaft und soziale Systeme in der Frühen Neuzeit, 24), Göttingen 2020, V&amp;R unipress, 346 S. / graph. Darst., € 50,00. (Michael Kaiser, Bonn) Hämmerle, Tobias E., Flugblatt-Propaganda zu Gustav Adolf von Schweden. Eine Auswertung zeitgenössischer Flugblätter der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Stockholm, Marburg 2019, Büchner-Verlag, 577 S. / Abb., € 45,00. (Michael Kaiser, Bonn) Hennings, Jan, Russia and Courtly Europe. Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648 – 1725 (New Studies in European History), Cambridge [u. a.] 2016, Cambridge University Press, XII u. 297 S. / Abb., £ 70,99. (Martina Winkler, Kiel) Bell, David A. / Yair Mintzker (Hrsg.), Rethinking the Age of Revolutions. France and the Birth of the Modern World, New York 2018, Oxford University Press, XXIX u. 287 S. / Abb., £ 64,00. (Volker Depkat, Regensburg) Vallance, Edward (Hrsg.), Remembering Early Modern Revolutions. England, North America, France and Haiti (Remembering the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds), London / New York 2019, Routledge, XI u. 222 S., £ 90,00. (Volker Depkat, Regensburg) Mokhberi, Susan, The Persian Mirror. French Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France, New York 2019, Oxford University Press, XI u. 223 S. / Abb., £ 47,99. (Markus Friedrich, Hamburg) Fulda, Daniel (Hrsg.), Aufklärung fürs Auge. Ein anderer Blick auf das 18. Jahrhundert, Halle 2020, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 247 S. / Abb., € 38,00. (Denise Schlichting, Osnabrück) Müller, Miriam, Der sammelnde Professor. Wissensdinge an Universitäten des Alten Reichs im 18. Jahrhundert (Wissenschaftskulturen. Reihe I: Wissensgeschichte, 1), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 268 S. / Abb., € 44,00 (Bernhard Homa, Hannover) Schläwe, Elisabeth, Ins Gedächtnis geschrieben. Leben und Schreiben der Eleonora Wolff Metternich zur Gracht (1679 – 1755) (Transgressionen, 1), Stuttgart 2020, Steiner, 218 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Melanie Greinert, Kiel) Fingerhut-Säck, Mareike, Das Gottesreich auf Erden erweitern. Einführung und Festigung des Pietismus durch das Grafenpaar Sophie Charlotte und Christian Ernst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode in seiner Grafschaft (1710 – 1771) (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur Mitteldeutschlands, 5), Halle a. d. S. 2019, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 410 S. / Abb., € 54,00. (Thomas Dorfner, Aachen / Erfurt) Ihle, Stefan, Die Entführung des Johann Wilhelm Pfau in Halle 1734. Eine Studie zur Rivalität zweier anhaltischer Landesfürsten (Forschungen zur hallischen Stadtgeschichte, 28), Halle 2021, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 214 S. / Abb., € 24,00. (Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Berlin) Klesmann, Bernd, Die Notabelnversammlung 1787 in Versailles. Rahmenbedingungen und Gestaltungsoptionen eines nationalen Reformprojekts (Beihefte der Francia, 83), Ostfildern 2019, Thorbecke, 569 S., € 67,00. (Martin Wrede, Grenoble) Quaasdorf, Friedrich, Kursachsen und das Ende des Alten Reichs. Die Politik Dresdens auf dem Immerwährenden Reichstag zu Regensburg 1802 bis 1806 (Schriften zur sächsischen Geschichte und Volkskunde, 63), Leipzig 2020, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 449 S., € 55,00. (Dorothée Goetze, Bonn)

The recent announcement that the Costanera Center building in Santiago will finally open in 2012 is the latest episode in the building’s troubled history, during which it has been both the emblem of Chile’s booming economy and the grand symbol of its downturn in the context of the global recession. The mixed-use development –which includes what will be South America’s tallest building, standing 300 meters high— will feature a shopping mall with a number of restaurants and a cinema, two hotels, two shopping markets and office space.The previous chapter in its history was much less optimistic: during most of 2009 the project in the financial district of Santiago (colloquially known as Sanhattan) sat half-finished, its exposed concrete and reinforcement bars contrasting with a banner at the site that read Icono del Desarrollo Latinoamericano (“Icon of Latin American development”). Once a symbol of Chile’s soaring copper driven economy, the Costanera Center became an emblem of its decline, an all too visible manifestation of the dramatic downturn of the construction sector that saw dozens of projects like this coming to a halt and caught in a temporary-but-possibly-permanent state of suspension. According to the Corporación de Bienes de Capital (CBC), an institute that monitors private investment in Chile, a total of 105 projects at different stages of planning or construction were delayed, suspended or scrapped last year. Even though works at the Costanera Center slowly started again during December 2009, the massive earthquake that affected Chile at the end of February 2010 created new doubts about the development. The engineers in charge finally announced that the construction would continue at a rhythm of two and a half floors per month. At every level, height appears to be the measure of achievement: Chile is on its way of having the continent’s highest building, and the workers involved in the construction will see their pay rise as they literally climb higher and higher in their daily job. The destructive nature of the earthquake can be compared to the explosive and unchecked character of Santiago’s frenetic development and, indeed, the relationship between both phenomena goes beyond the metaphorical (and not just because the recently elected president Sebastian Piñera named a number of high profile businessmen in the construction sector as the new local authorities for the five worst affected regions, arguing that their expertise would be key to the success of the reconstruction). The earthquake swept away not the very old, but the very new in Santiago and other major Chilean cities like Concepción, generating a temporal displacement in which rise and fall, birth and decline simultaneously appear at the construction site. Halted projects like the Costanera Center and the newly-finished-but-already-ruined buildings both express a frozen form of architecture that cannot be expended, enjoyed or consumed.Paradoxically, and in spite of their evident fragility, these buildings present themselves as having a solid, uni-dimensional meaning rather than a contingent quality; they stand still, maintained as they are, waiting either for an order of demolition or the reactivation of works. To this extent, these constructions represent a notion of waste that does not appear to be generative, but rather, seems to be suspended and vacant. Even though they might have radically different fates, in their present state both halted projects and half-ruined buildings refer to the same condition of waste. These examples of development and decline are inscribed within the larger processes of speculative construction and economic control that have shaped Chile’s urban landscape from the 1970s onwards. These processes echo the experiences of other countries but are also particular to Chile’s history, its rapid modernisation, its troubled recent political past, and its vulnerability to natural disasters. The suspended landscape created by these buildings appears to limit the potentialities that otherwise contingent spaces could have. The work of the British architect Cedric Price, for instance, addresses the endless capacity of buildings to maintain themselves in a condition of openness, without any reference to past or future functions. In his understanding, the interval—manifested, for example, in the period in which a structure is yet-to-be-built, or in the moment in which the construction is paralysed due to economic or regulation constraints (which is, indeed, the present state of these Chilean buildings)—is an opportunity to be free from any limitation from the past or any aspiration to future glory, a condition of potentiality that generates new processes of exchange. But Price’s projects—which vary from very simple design solutions to buildings in a more conventional sense—could only work if they are able to engage with the present of the construction without privileging any particular outcome. In contrast, the examples of architecture coming to a standstill in Chile (due to the fragility of the country’s economy and the foundations of its flashy construction) can be seen as static monuments that do not commemorate a past event but rather refer to a future that is already out of date. Rather than generating new uses while these projects are halted, they remain encircled, in arrested development; limiting the transformable aspects that might be derived from their current uncertain position. From the 1970s Chile abandoned its old state-centred policies in favour of a virtually unregulated free-market economy. Indeed, recent accounts of the earthquake metaphorically recall Milton Freedman’s doctrine of shock (the imposition of capitalism without any softening of its sharp edges) as a discursive figure: the American economist was advisor to General Pinochet during his dictatorship and a whole generation of highly influential Chilean professionals received a first-hand education from Friedman at the University of Chicago. ‘The Chicago Boys,’ as the group is commonly known in Chile, exerted a direct influence over the complete re-organisation of the country’s public health and education systems, alongside the transformation of its material infrastructure in a process not dissimilar to the changes wrought by earthquake and tsunami. Santiago, in particular, is a city that has transformed its old urban fabric like no other in Latin America. The city is an extreme example of the boom-and-bust development process: plans get approved, buildings get ready and constructions become dated within an incredibly short life-span. Development opportunities in the city centre are rapidly becoming scarce, and construction companies now look to demolish whole buildings to source their land. Other companies buy any property that remains in the wealthier neighborhoods without concrete plans to build anything; these properties are laid to waste, with their gardens unkempt, masses of weeds covering the walls. Consumer sites dedicated to urbanism and architecture such as www.plataformaurbana.cl suggest that the earthquake has provided new opportunities for land speculation and rapid demolition. In Talca (another city badly damaged by the earthquake), construction companies offer new, cheap houses on the city fringe in exchange for damaged properties near the historic centre.Among the endless images of destruction reproduced after the earthquake, the most notorious depict recently built constructions in complete ruins. In Santiago, at least 23 apartment buildings were abandoned and/or received demolition orders in the aftermath of the quake. The development known as Condominio Don Tristan (which, split in half and severely inclined towards one side, became the most emblematic image of the catastrophe) still has the signs reading Visite Departamento Piloto (“Come and Visit the Showroom Apartment”).Interestingly, this type of destruction generated significantly less international attention and media coverage than in the case of Haiti, since Chile presented an image of coping well with the disaster. TV and press images did not communicate a total collapse but rather a sensation of time frozen, or stillness. Analysing the media images, it is salient to note that there is not much rubble in these pictures or people excavating the debris; rather, most of them depict buildings with no one around, empty, standing still. Unlike the images of Haiti, where the devastation took the form of endless piles of rubbish and unsorted rubble, the visual face of the catastrophe in Chile is that of halted construction.In spite of the discrepancy between a building destroyed by disaster and one left unfinished, Chile’s architectural landscape betrays no substantial difference between those structures half-finished and those half-ruined in either the terms of their use (or rather their lack of function, since they cannot be inhabited, used, or enjoyed) or in the bareness of the limbo in which they find themselves. These structures are dumping grounds, not of traditional waste, but of useless forms of architecture. As dumping sites they are void spaces within the city, monitored places that people surround but do not pass through. Paradoxically, they are also the most expensive sites in the city, in terms of both the money spent on them and land prices. They are luxurious dumps. It is the apparent stillness and temporal displacement of Chile’s developments that distinguish these buildings laid to waste from other types of contemporary ruins. Without aiming for it some of these constructions have been ruined before even having been built. There is, however, no ‘ruin value’ here as there was, for instance, in Albert Speer’s ideal of building projects that would decay in an aesthetically pleasant way. In spite of the desire for novelty that animated their creators, the buildings have fallen into a condition of sameness.The artist Robert Smithson made a similar observation in relation to his native New Jersey when he remarked that the city, unlike its cosmopolitan sister New York, gave up any desire to become part of the “big events” of history. In two essays dedicated to his home state Smithson suggests that the unused bridges and dated water pipes dismantle time in their total lack of aspiration. However, in his appreciation of these obsolete artefacts he is not arguing for a romantic redemption of the industrial ruin, nor is his aim to give them an aesthetic quality as objects of venerable decay.That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is, all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other “out of date” things (“A Tour” 72). According to Smithson, everything seems to be declining in a present, even time. New Jersey’s suburban monuments are cheap and flat and embrace a future already outdated, as do Chile’s suspended buildings. Smithson does not seek to redeem the abandoned or unnoticed industrial landscapes of New Jersey (which, unlike Chile’s wasted buildings, inhabit the periphery rather than the centre of the city) but rather to stress how they embrace, through their vacant character, a total immanence.Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future. … They are not built for the ages but rather against the ages. They are involved in a systematic reduction of time down to fractions of seconds, rather than representing the long spaces of centuries. Both past and future are placed into an objective present (“Entropy” 11).According to Smithson, the suburbs are privileged in comparison with big cities because they are uninterested in making history. The flaws and holes of their streets enact more clearly the immanence he is trying to argue for: “those holes are monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures” (“A Tour” 72). It is interesting how the artist expresses similar concerns when writing about erosion, entropy and natural disasters, not least because they relate the wasted products of architecture with geological destruction, a connection that can also be observed in the case of Chile.Written in 1966 before the rise of the ecological movement, a text like “Entropy and the New Monuments” links conditions of disorder and decay with a new kind of monumentality embodied in the undistinguished landscape of suspension. Smithson presents entropy as an irreversible and evolutionary process, yet not an idealistic one; even though these spaces were animated by evolutionary and modernisation processes, they now offer nothing but suspension. It is here that Smithson’s writings seem most pertinent in relation to Chile’s voided spaces. Unlike organic dumps, where refuse products rot and transform, Chile’s developments these express their entropic character in their stillness, in their absence of generative energy.Recent critical theory has given significant attention to industrial ruins and has revaluated their cultural importance, arguing, from diverse perspectives, that processes of destruction could release new layers of meaning or generate different forms of knowledge. The writings of Dylan Trigg, for instance, make use of ruins to construct a philosophical critique of the notions of temporality and progress. Chilean born photographer Camilo José Vergara proposes to convert the failed modernity of Detroit’s buildings into a space of playful awareness. Tim Edensor vindicates ruins with particular enthusiasm, refuting the notion of an industrial wasteland and re-imagining ruins as spaces of leisure, shelter, creativity and alternative public life (21). This unpredictable unfolding of new meanings does not seem to be present in Chile’s suspended architecture. These buildings are yet to be consumed, and therefore they somehow pervert architecture’s cycle of novelty and obsolescence, while remaining in a state of suspension, waiting to be demolished.ReferencesEdensor, Tim. Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005.Smithson, Robert. “Entropy and the New Monuments”. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1996. 10–23.———. “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey”. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1996. 68–74.Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. Vergara, Camilo Jose. The New American Ghetto. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1997.

Kumar, Krishan, Visions of Empire. How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World, Princeton / Oxford 2017, Princeton University Press, XVIII u. 576 S. / Abb., £ 32,95. (Wolfgang Reinhard) Drews, Wolfram / Christian Scholl (Hrsg.), Transkulturelle Verflechtungsprozesse in der Vormoderne (Das Mittelalter. Beihefte, 3), Berlin/Boston 2016,de Gruyter, XXIII u.287 S. / Abb., € 89,95. (Jenny Rahel Oesterle) Jochum, Georg, ”Plus Ultra“ oder die Erfindung der Moderne. Zur neuzeitlichen Entgrenzung der okzidentalen Welt (Global Studies), Bielefeld 2017, transcript, 602 S. / Abb., € 44,99. (Wolfgang Reinhard) Raeymaekers, Dries / Sebastiaan Derks (Hrsg.), The Key to Power? The Culture of Access in Princely Courts, 1400–1750 (Rulers and Elites, 8), Leiden/Boston 2016, Brill, XIII u. 352 S. / Abb., € 135,00. (Andreas Pecar) Knobler, Adam, Mythology and Diplomacy in the Age of Exploration (European Expansion and Indigenous Response, 23), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XI u. 151 S., € 99,00; als Brill MyBook € 25,00. (Tobias Winnerling) Muhlack, Ulrich, Renaissance und Humanismus (Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 93), Berlin / Boston 2017, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, IX u. 276 S., € 24,95 (Volker Reinhardt) Hamm, Berndt / Thomas Kaufmann (Hrsg.), Wie fromm waren die Humanisten? (Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, 33), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 359 S. / Abb., € 84,00. (Nikolaus Staubach) Auge, Oliver (Hrsg.), König, Reich und Fürsten im Mittelalter. Abschlusstagung des Greifswalder ”Principes-Projekts“. Festschrift für Karl-Heinz Spieß (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Greifswald, 12), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, 593 S. / Abb., € 94,00. (Andreas Büttner) Huang, Angela, Die Textilien des Hanseraums. Produktion und Distribution einer spätmittelalterlichen Fernhandelsware (Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte. Neue Folge, 71), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2015, Böhlau, 311 S. / graph. Darst., € 40,00. (Kirsten O. Frieling) Hirbodian, Sigrid / Peter Rückert (Hrsg.), Württembergische Städte im späten Mittelalter. Herrschaft, Wirtschaft und Kultur im Vergleich (Tübinger Bausteine zur Landesgeschichte, 26), Ostfildern 2016, Thorbecke, 332 S. / Abb., € 35,00.(Stefan G. Holz) Esch, Claudia, Zwischen Institution und Individuum. Bürgerliche Handlungsspielräume im mittelalterlichen Bamberg (Stadt und Region in der Vormoderne, 4), Würzburg 2016, Ergon, 576 S. / graph. Darst., € 72,00. (Ulrich Knefelkamp) Mayer, Hans E., Von der Cour des Bourgeois zum öffentlichen Notariat. Die freiwillige Gerichtsbarkeit in den Kreuzfahrerstaaten (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Schriften, 70), Wiesbaden 2016, Harrassowitz, XXXIV u. 526 S., € 70,00. (Wolf Zöller) Hesse, Christian, Synthese und Aufbruch. 1346–1410 (Gebhardt. Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 7b), Stuttgart 2017, Klett-Cotta, XLVIII u. 300 S., € 45,00. (Gabriela Signori) Frey, Stefan, Fromme feste Junker. Neuer Stadtadel im spätmittelalterlichen Zürich (Mitteilungen der Antiquarischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, 84), Zürich 2017, Chronos, 216 S. / Abb., € 43,00. (Christof Rolker) Matter-Bacon, Nicole, Städtische Ehepaare im Spätmittelalter. Verhaltensmuster und Handlungsspielräume imZürich des 15. Jahrhunderts (Wissenschaftliche Beiträge aus dem Tectum Verlag. Reihe: Geschichtswissenschaft, 30), Marburg 2016, Tectum, 412 S., € 39,95. (Elisabeth Vavra) Halter-Pernet, Colee / Felix Hammerli, Zürichs streitbarer Gelehrter im Spätmittelalter. Mit Übersetzungen aus dem Lateinischenv.Helena Müller u. Erika Egner Eid, Zürich 2017, Chronos, 446 S. / Abb., € 52,00. (Martina Wehrli-Johns) Kyle, Sarah R., Medicine and Humanism inLate Medieval Italy. 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(Hrsg.),Economic Growth and the Origins of Modern Political Economy.Economic Reasons of State, 1500–2000, London/NewYork 2016, Routledge, XII u. 317 S. / Abb., £ 95,00. (Justus Nipperdey) Burgdorf, Wolfgang (Bearb.), Die Wahlkapitulationen der römisch-deutschen Könige und Kaiser 1519–1792 (Quellen zur Geschichte des Heiligen Römischen Reiches, 1), Göttingen 2015, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 884 S., € 90,00. Burgdorf, Wolfgang, Protokonstitutionalismus. Die Reichsverfassung in den Wahlkapitulationen der römisch-deutschen Könige und Kaiser 1519–1792 (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 94), Göttingen / Bristol 2015, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 226 S., € 60,00. Durchhardt, Heinz (Hrsg.), Wahlkapitulationen in Europa (Schriftenreihe der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 95), Göttingen / Bristol 2015, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 172 S. / Abb, € 55,00. 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(Ulrich Niggemann) Cevolini, Alberto (Hrsg.), Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe (Library of the Written Word, 53; The Handpress World, 40), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XI u. 389 S., € 154,00. (Martin Gierl) Freist, Dagmar / Susanne Lachenicht (Hrsg.), Connecting Worlds and People. Early Modern Diasporas, Abingdon / New York 2017, Routledge, XIII u. 149 S./ graph. Darst., £ 95,00. (Thomas Dorfner) Boer, Wietsede / Karl A. E. Enenkel / Walter S. Melion(Hrsg.), Jesuit Image Theory (Intersections, 45), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XIX u. 497 S. / Abb., € 172,00. (Dominik Sieber) Abreu, Laurinda, The Political and Social Dynamics of Poverty, Poor Relief and Health Care in Early-Modern Portugal (The History of Medicine in Context), London / New York 2016, Routledge, VI u. 302 S. / graph. Darst., £ 110,00. (Robert Jütte) Häberlein, Mark (Hrsg.), Sprachmeister. Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte eines prekären Berufsstands (Schriften der Matthias-Kramer-Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Fremdsprachenerwerbs und der Mehrsprachigkeit, 1), Bamberg 2015, University of Bamberg Press, 218 S. / Abb., € 18,00. (Michael Schaich) Handley, Sasha, Sleep in Early Modern England, New Haven / London 2016, Yale University Press, XII u. 280 S. / Abb., $ 65,00. (Marion Kintzinger) Nieden, Marcel (Hrsg.), Ketzer, Held und Prediger. Martin Luther im Gedächtnis der Deutschen, Darmstadt 2017, Lambert Schneider, 248 S. / Abb., € 49,95. Rößler, Hole (Hrsg.), Luthermania. Ansichten einer Kultfigur (Ausstellungskataloge der Herzog August Bibliothek, 99), Wiesbaden 2017, Harrassowitz in Kommission, 407 S. / Abb., € 39,80. (Eike Wolgast) Eser, Thomas / Stephanie Armer (Hrsg.), Luther, Kolumbus und die Folgen. Welt im Wandel 1500–1600. Ausstellung im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg vom 13. Juli bis 12. November 2017, Nürnberg 2017, Verlag des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 312 S. / Abb., € 36,00.(Heinz Schilling) Biagioni, Mario, The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe. A Lasting Heritage (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 207), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XI u. 180 S., € 108,00. (Hans-Jürgen Goertz) Peters, Christian, Vom Humanismus zum Täuferreich. Der Weg des Bernhard Rothmann (Refo500 Academic Studies, 38), Göttingen / Bristol 2017, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 201 S. / Abb., € 90,00. (James M. Stayer) Bräuer, Siegfried / Günther Vogler / Thomas Müntzer, Neu Ordnung machen in der Welt. Eine Biographie, Gütersloh 2016, Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 496 S./ Abb., € 58,00. (Ulrich Bubenheimer) Müntzer, Thomas, Manuskripte und Notizen, hrsg. v. Armin Kohnle/Eike Wolgast unter Mitarbeit v. Vasily Arslanov / Alexander Bartmuß / Christine Haustein (Thomas-Müntzer-Ausgabe. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 1), Leipzig 2017, Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaftenzu Leipzig/Evangelische Verlagsanstalt inKommission, XXIII u. 546 S., € 58,00. (Cornel Zwierlein) Selderhuis, Herman J. / Arnold Huijgen (Hrsg.), Calvinus Pastor Ecclesiae. Papers of the Eleventh International Congress on Calvin Research (Reformed Historical Theology, 39), Göttingen / Bristol 2016, Vandenhoeck &amp; Ruprecht, 467 S., € 120,00. (Iris Fleßenkämper) McCallum, John, Scotland’s LongReformation.NewPerspectives on Scottish Religion, c. 1500–c. 1600 (St AndrewsStudies in Reformation History), Leiden/Boston 2016, Brill, XI u. 230 S. / Abb., € 110,00. (Martin Foerster) Toenjes, Christopher, Islam, the Turks and the Making of the Reformation. The History of the Ottoman Empire in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Frankfurt a. M. [u. a.] 2016, Lang, XVI u. 447 S. / Abb., € 74,70. (Stefan Hanß) GarcÍa-Arenal (Hrsg.), After Conversion. Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700), Leiden / Boston 2016, Brill, XII u. 463 S. / Abb., € 181,00; als eBook open access. Norton, Claire, ConversionandIslam in the EarlyModernMediterranean.The Lure of the Other (Routledge Research in Early Modern History), London / New York 2017, Routledge, X u. 222 S. / Abb., £ 110,00; als eBook £ 35,99. (Christian Windler) Graf, Tobias P., The Sultan’s Renegades. Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite,1575–1610, Oxford 2017, Oxford University Press, XX u. 261 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Arkadiusz Blaszczyk) Hans Dernschwam’s Tagebuch einer Reise nach Konstantinopel und Kleinasien (1553/55), hrsg. v. Franz Babinger, ins Neuhochdeutsche übers. v. Jörg Riecke, Berlin 2014, Duncker &amp; Humblot, XXXVII u. 300 S. / Abb., € 69,90. (Mathis Leibetseder) Comerford, Kathleen M., Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532–1621 (Jesuit Studies, 7), Leiden / Boston 2017, Brill, XVI u. 316 S. / graph. Darst., € 142,00. (Fabian Fechner) Nicolaus von Amsdorff, Ausgewählte Schriften der Jahre 1550 bis 1562 aus der ehemaligen Eisenacher Ministerialbibliothek, hrsg. v. Hagen Jäger (Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie, 32), Leipzig 2017, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 284 S., € 48,00. (Volker Leppin) Piltz, Eric / Gerd Schwerhoff (Hrsg.), Gottlosigkeit und Eigensinn. Religiöse Devianz im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung. Beiheft, 51), Berlin 2015, Duncker &amp; Humblot, 530 S. / Abb., € 69,90. (Martin Scheutz) Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm / Friedrich Vollhardt (Hrsg.), Ideengeschichte um 1600. Konstellationen zwischen Schulmetaphysik, Konfessionalisierung und hermetischer Spekulation (Problemata, 158), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2017, Frommann-Holzboog, 338 S. / Abb., € 68,00. (Tobias Winnerling) Friedrich, Markus / Sascha Salatowsky / Luise Schorn-Schütte (Hrsg.), Konfession, Politik und Gelehrsamkeit. Der Jenaer Theologe Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) im Kontext seiner Zeit (Gothaer Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit, 11), Stuttgart 2017, Steiner, 280 S., € 52,00. (Martin Gierl) Schleinert, Dirk / Monika Schneikart (Hrsg.), Zwischen Thronsaal und Frawenzimmer. Handlungsfelder pommerscher Fürstinnen um 1600 (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Pommern. Reihe V: Forschungen zur pommerschen Geschichte, 50), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 402 S. / Abb., € 55,00. (Katrin Keller) Wareing, John, Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618–1718. „There is Great Want of Servants“, Oxford / New York 2017, Oxford University Press, VIII u. 298 S. / Abb., £ 75,00. (Mark Häberlein) May, Niels F., Zwischen fürstlicher Repräsentation und adliger Statuspolitik. Das Kongresszeremoniell bei den westfälischen Friedensverhandlungen (Beihefte der Francia, 82), Ostfildern 2016, Thorbecke, 284 S., € 42,00. (Anuschka Tischer) Haupt, Herbert, Ein Herr von Stand und Würde. Fürst Johann Adam Andreas von Liechtenstein (1657–1712). Mosaiksteine eines Lebens, Köln / Weimar / Wien 2016, Böhlau, 389 S. / Abb., € 47,00. (Thomas Winkelbauer) Homa, Bernhard, Die Tübinger Philosophische Fakultät 1652–1752. Institution – Disziplinen – Lehrkräfte (Contubernium, 85), Stuttgart 2016, Steiner, 428 S. / 1 CDROM, € 69,00. (Martin Gierl) Windler, Christian (Hrsg.), Kongressorte der Frühen Neuzeit im europäischen Vergleich. Der Friede von Baden (1714), Köln/Weimar/Wien 2016, Böhlau, 303 S. / Abb., € 19,90. (Regina Dauser) Pecar, Andreas / Holger Zaunstöck / Thomas Müller-Bahlke (Hrsg.), Wie pietistisch kann Adel sein? Hallescher Pietismus und Reichsadel im 18. Jahrhundert (Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte Sachsen-Anhalts, 10), Halle a. d. S. 2016, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 176 S. / Abb., € 25,00. (Martin Gierl) Eißner, Daniel, Erweckte Handwerker im Umfeld des Pietismus. Zur religiösen Selbstermächtigung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Hallesche Forschungen, 43), Halle a. d. S. / Wiesbaden 2016, Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen / Harrassowitz in Kommission, IX u. 384 S., € 52,00. (Martin Gierl) Black, Jeremy, British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1744–57. Mid-Century Crisis, Farnham / Burlington 2015, Ashgate, XIV u. 267 S., £ 70,00. (Michael Schaich) Stobart, Jon / Mark Rothery (Hrsg.), Consumption and the Country House, Oxford / New York 2016, Oxford University Press, X u. 304 S. / Abb., £ 65,00. (Michael Maurer) Diest, Johann von, Wirtschaftspolitik und Lobbyismus im 18. Jahrhundert. Eine quellenbasierte Neubewertung der wechselseitigen Einflussnahme von Obrigkeit und Wirtschaft in Brandenburg-Preußen und Kurhannover (Herrschaft und soziale Systeme in der Frühen Neuzeit, 23), Göttingen 2016, V&amp;R unipress, 392 S., € 55,00. 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Precious metals are to mercantile capitalism what paper is to industrial capitalism and what plastic and electronics are to post-industrial capitalism—which is to say, the different materials and their specific textual forms become the dominant, if not always preferred, means of transferring and storing value or wealth in their respective capitalist phases. As a distinct “text,” what separates the precious metals from the materials that follow them is that they are seen as “natural money.” In Capital, for example, Karl Marx endorses Galiani’s view that “although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver”(92-3). Common enough even among contemporary economists, this view relies upon a conception of “Nature” and money that paper began to unsettle and that the new forms of plastic and electronic money altogether erase. Thus Marshall McLuhan early on proclaimed that the new electronic technologies put “the very concept of money [ . . . ] in jeopardy . . .” (138-9). Even if this is in part true—and I think it is—how does one explain the current proliferation of money thanks to plastic cards and electronic money? Georg Simmel, in his monumental The Philosophy of Money, provides one possible answer. Discussing the war between Spain and the Netherlands, Simmel generalizes “ . . . and one might say paradoxically that, the more it is really money in its essential significance, the less need there is for it to be money in a material sense”(171). Plastic and electronic technologies, far from threatening the “very concept of money,” have worked to free the “essential significance” of money from its previous material forms. Certain forms of money may indeed be in jeopardy but, precisely because of this, the concept of money is all the more necessary to the ideological harmony of post-industrial capitalism. It would even be going too far to say that the new plastic and electronic forms of exchange threaten the aura of money. Instead, it is more advantageous to see these differing materials and their textual forms as representing competing mythologies. As a starting point, consider the de a ocho reales (pieces-of-eight) often referred to as the Spanish or pillar dollar. Minted from silver that came from the Spanish Empire’s silver mines in the New World, it represents the peak of mercantile capitalism. On its obverse side is the image of two worlds between two columns, representing the Pillars of Hercules. Winding around the columns is a banner with the inscription “plus ultra” (more beyond). On one level, this promise was frighteningly true—estimates range from a staggering 145,000 to 165,000 tons of silver extracted from the New World by Europeans (Weatherford 100). And yet, the promise of infinite wealth is belied, ultimately, by the finite nature of the material being used to fashion this text. In contrast, consider the inscription found on the first coin minted in 1787 by the newly established United States of America. The one-cent copper coin bears the motto “Fugio MIND YOUR BUSINESS” and shows the sun above a sundial. The references to time (fugio or I fly) are clearly indebted to the axiom “time is money”, which comes from a founding father of the new nation, Benjamin Franklin, who, perhaps more than any other, lived out and popularized its revolutionary ideology. “Mind your business” is equally Franklinesque and equally expressive of the spirit necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism. Nonetheless, the coin’s advice, like the Spanish dollar’s promise, contains its own instability. The relatively congenial warning that wasting your time will cost you money is undercut by the pugnacious double entendre contained in “mind your business”, which can also mean stay out of other people’s affairs. The double meaning of “mind your business” encapsulates a rationalist utopia of individual citizens who serve the common good simply by tending to their own gardens or minding their own businesses. In less than seventy-five years, America’s Civil War violently exposed the internal contradictions of such an aspiration. Switching the motto of the Spanish silver dollar with that of the American copper penny results in a jarring confusion that illustrates the ideological divide between mercantile and industrial capital that the two coins represent. The Spanish dollar promises infinite wealth based upon trade, an individual’s appetite for “more,” and access to scarce commodities (gold and silver). The American penny promises endless work based upon production, self-interest, and access to cheap commodities, such as copper. This American work ethic fueled a pathological amassing of wealth that is similar to and yet distinct from the mercantile period preceding it. The differences and similarities are like those that Marx finds between the miser and the capitalist: “This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser”(151). Adapting Marx’s comparison, then, it would be more accurate to say the mercantile capitalist is an unfinished capitalist, distracted from his purpose by the maddening allure of the miser’s horde. While the industrial capitalist, on the other hand, may be the truer capitalist, he is still a miser, albeit a rational one. If capitalists are going to realize their full potential as “rational misers” the history of America shows they can only achieve this with a medium of exchange that is cheaper, more accessible, and more disposable than copper or any other metal. Through paper currency, America not only financed its revolution, making it the first nation in the history of the world to do so, it also financed its westward expansion, the North’s victory in the Civil War, and it unleashed the productive capacities necessary for an industrial revolution that would surpass its European rivals. The design found on America’s modern one-dollar bill—which except for minor changes has remained the same since 1935—reveals a textual indeterminacy, like that found in the Spanish dollar and America’s revolutionary copper penny. The first aspect of its indeterminacy is in the nature of all paper currencies. Their cheap materials, relatively easy production, and fiat value make them attractive to counterfeiters as well as governments. To a degree unmatched by coins, paper money’s text is driven by anxieties over counterfeiting. For example, the signatures of the U.S. Treasurer and Secretary of the Treasury on the front of America’s paper currency are motivated in part by this anxiety. But the signing of an official’s name holds a deeper significance, one that separates paper currency from metal. Paper currency seems to call for a signature the way metal coins call for heads in profile. Metal coins, even when machine made, still evoke the artisan and his mode of production—circumscribed, organic, and coherent. The very real artisanship that goes into paper currency is lost in a surreal sea of printed signs—open, fragmented, and dreamlike. The signature, although mechanically reproduced, leaves the trace of a human hand and the individual to which it belongs. In a world where exchange value is created by artificial means that are essentially limitless, the signature is a reassuring reminder of human limits and authority. A different sort of tension is on the back of the dollar bill. Here the front and back of the Great Seal of the United States are on either side of a “ONE” in large letters at the center of the rectangular design. The contraries contained in the Great Seal—war and peace represented by the olive branch and arrows the eagle holds in its talons and the material and the spiritual aspects of life represented by the unfinished pyramid and the eye of the Deity that shines above it—draw the viewer into a web of triangular sight lines. The back of the Seal encircles an apparent triangle formed by the pyramid and the eye above it. The encircled triangle in the Seal’s front is subtler. It is made by the number thirteen which appears in the thirteen stars above the eagle’s head and the thirteen olive leaves and arrows held in the eagle’s talons. This triangular symmetry is reinforced by the four numeral 1s with “one” written across them that appear one in each corner of the bill’s design. These 1s create bisecting diagonal sight lines that connect with and pass through the “ONE” at the center of the rectangle, thereby cutting the rectangle into four symmetrical triangles. At the very least, all this (in)visible triangular symmetry could be called overdetermined—an excessive attempt to impress order on a chaotic world and to naturalize the text’s claim as “legal tender.” If, as Simmel maintains, “all money is credit” (Ingham 24), then by one line of reasoning, it would be easy for credit cards to acknowledge this truth. Instead, like the other monetary forms we have examined, their texts work to obfuscate the social character of exchange value and naturalize or mythologize their authority. Like paper money’s connection to the printing press, credit cards are also connected to a revolutionary technology, the petroleum industry. It is fitting that credit cards are made of plastic, a by-product of oil refineries, since they originated in the 1930s as a convenience to drivers provided by the major oil companies. Even as different businesses extended the use of credit cards, they have retained their early association with the world of travel and the pleasures of mobility—both physical and social. With the company’s origin in the travel business, the American Express credit card is uniquely positioned to exploit the pleasures of mobility, and the history of its credit card designs helps to illustrate some of the ideological shifting required of post-industrial capitalism. As Jack Weatherford points out in his History of Money, American Express made effective use of a card class system. Starting in 1958 with their purple card, the color of royalty, they sought to attract consumers with a feeling of exclusivity. Some years later, they switched to the famous green card, the color of American money. In 1966, they added the distinction of the gold card for elite members. As the numbers of gold card members swelled, they sought further distinctions, such as the black card that was quickly replaced by the platinum card (229). A striking aspect of these textual permutations, given the focus of this paper, is the credit company’s reliance on the security of older monetary forms, such as precious metals and American paper currency, to attract consumers. Now that credit cards rule supreme, it is hard to recall consumers’ earlier antipathy towards them. In 1971, after credit cards were well established, one study found that almost one-third of the families interviewed thought it was “bad business to use credit cards,” and even among credit card users, nearly one-fifth felt it was “bad” (Moore and Russell 78). In contrast, the design of the latest card by American Express, its blue card, boldly proclaims the apotheosis of credit—a blue hologram suspended in transparent plastic. Here is the ultimate medium: a transparency that promises to take its possessor at the speed of light into the depths of hyperspace. Beneath these specific historical texts, lies a deeper and more general ontological association between plastic and movement, which Roland Barthes uncovers in his ruminations upon the substance in Mythologies. In its protean ability to imitate life, plastic is “less a thing than the trace of a movement”(97). And Barthes maintains our new plastic mobility revolutionizes our relationship to life itself. The finite character of metal and paper for storing and transferring wealth were always more or less apparent. Precious metals were limited by the natural laws of scarcity—first come, first served. Paper promised a world of infinite wealth, but it always threatened to hyperinflate, collapsing into worthless piles. Sometimes implicitly or sometimes explicitly, paper still relied on nature’s scarcity in order to justify its claim to value. Plastic needs no such justification. As Barthes puts it, with plastic, “the hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized . . .”(99). In a plastic world, there are no limits on what or how much we can produce. And in such a world, only an abstract and infinite medium of exchange, such as credit, can promise to return our alienated labor to us through the plasticized commodities it purchases. Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Anette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. Ingham, Geoffry. “’Babylonian Madness’: On the Historical and Sociological Origins of Money.” What Is Money? Ed. John Smithin. London: Routledge, 2000. 16-41. Marx, Karl. Capital Volume One. Ed. Frederick Engels. New York: International, 1987. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. Moore, Carl H. and Alvin E. Russell. Money: Its Origin, Development and Modern Use. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Ed. David Frisby. Trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 1990. Weatherford, Jack. The History of Money. New York: Crown, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rizzo, Sergio. "'Show Me the Money!'" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/09-rizzo.php>. APA Style Rizzo, S. (2004, Jan 12). 'Show Me the Money!'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/09-rizzo.php>

1. Guy Debord in the Land of the Long WeekendIt’s the weekend – leisure time. It’s the interlude when, Guy Debord contends, the proletarian is briefly free of the “total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and management of production” in commodity capitalism; when workers are temporarily “treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers.” But this patronising show turns out to be another form of subjection to the diktats of “political economy”: “the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’.” (30). As Debord suggests, even the creation of leisure time and space is predicated upon a form of contempt: the “perfected denial” of who we, as living people, really are in the eyes of those who presume the power to legislate our working practices and private identities.This Saturday The Weekend Australian runs an opinion piece by Christopher Pearson, defending ABC Radio National’s Stephen Crittenden, whose program The Religion Report has been axed. “Some of Crittenden’s finest half-hours have been devoted to Islam in Australia in the wake of September 11,” Pearson writes. “Again and again he’s confronted a left-of-centre audience that expected multi-cultural pieties with disturbing assertions.” Along the way in this admirable Crusade, Pearson notes that Crittenden has exposed “the Left’s recent tendency to ally itself with Islam.” According to Pearson, Crittenden has also thankfully given oxygen to claims by James Cook University’s Mervyn Bendle, the “fairly conservative academic whose work sometimes appears in [these] pages,” that “the discipline of critical terrorism studies has been captured by neo-Marxists of a postmodern bent” (30). Both of these points are well beyond misunderstanding or untested proposition. If Pearson means them sincerely he should be embarrassed and sacked. But of course he does not and will not be. These are deliberate lies, the confabulations of an eminent right-wing culture warrior whose job is to vilify minorities and intellectuals (Bendle escapes censure as an academic because he occasionally scribbles for the Murdoch press). It should be observed, too, how the patent absurdity of Pearson’s remarks reveals the extent to which he holds the intelligence of his readers in contempt. And he is not original in peddling these toxic wares.In their insightful—often hilarious—study of Australian opinion writers, The War on Democracy, Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler identify the left-academic-Islam nexus as the brain-child of former Treasurer-cum-memoirist Peter Costello. The germinal moment was “a speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue forum at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2005” concerning anti-Americanism in Australian schools. Lucy and Mickler argue that “it was only a matter of time” before a conservative politician or journalist took the plunge to link the left and terrorism, and Costello plunged brilliantly. He drew a mental map of the Great Chain of Being: left-wing academics taught teacher trainees to be anti-American; teacher trainees became teachers and taught kids to be anti-American; anti-Americanism morphs into anti-Westernism; anti-Westernism veers into terrorism (38). This is contempt for the reasoning capacity of the Australian people and, further still, contempt for any observable reality. Not for nothing was Costello generally perceived by the public as a politician whose very physiognomy radiated smugness and contempt.Recycling Costello, Christopher Pearson’s article subtly interpellates the reader as an ordinary, common-sense individual who instinctively feels what’s right and has no need to think too much—thinking too much is the prerogative of “neo-Marxists” and postmodernists. Ultimately, Pearson’s article is about channelling outrage: directing the down-to-earth passions of the Australian people against stock-in-trade culture-war hate figures. And in Pearson’s paranoid world, words like “neo-Marxist” and “postmodern” are devoid of historical or intellectual meaning. They are, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy repeatedly demonstrate, mere ciphers packed with the baggage of contempt for independent critical thought itself.Contempt is everywhere this weekend. The Weekend Australian’s colour magazine runs a feature story on Malcolm Turnbull: one of those familiar profiles designed to reveal the everyday human touch of the political classes. In this puff-piece, Jennifer Hewett finds Turnbull has “a restless passion for participating in public life” (20); that beneath “the aggressive political rhetoric […] behind the journalist turned lawyer turned banker turned politician turned would-be prime minister is a man who really enjoys that human interaction, however brief, with the many, many ordinary people he encounters” (16). Given all this energetic turning, it’s a wonder that Turnbull has time for human interactions at all. The distinction here of Turnbull and “many, many ordinary people” – the anonymous masses – surely runs counter to Hewett’s brief to personalise and quotidianise him. Likewise, those two key words, “however brief”, have an unfortunate, unintended effect. Presumably meant to conjure a picture of Turnbull’s hectic schedules and serial turnings, the words also convey the image of a patrician who begrudgingly knows one of the costs of a political career is that common flesh must be pressed—but as gingerly as possible.Hewett proceeds to disclose that Turnbull is “no conservative cultural warrior”, “onfounds stereotypes” and “hates labels” (like any baby-boomer rebel) and “has always read widely on political philosophy—his favourite is Edmund Burke”. He sees the “role of the state above all as enabling people to do their best” but knows that “the main game is the economy” and is “content to play mainstream gesture politics” (19). I am genuinely puzzled by this and imagine that my intelligence is being held in contempt once again. That the man of substance is given to populist gesturing is problematic enough; but that the Burke fan believes the state is about personal empowerment is just too much. Maybe Turnbull is a fan of Burke’s complex writings on the sublime and the beautiful—but no, Hewett avers, Turnbull is engaged by Burke’s “political philosophy”. So what is it in Burke that Turnbull finds to favour?Turnbull’s invocation of Edmund Burke is empty, gestural and contradictory. The comfortable notion that the state helps people to realise their potential is contravened by Burke’s view that the state functions so “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection… by a power out of themselves” (151). Nor does Burke believe that anyone of humble origins could or should rise to the top of the social heap: “The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person… the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule” (138).If Turnbull’s main game as a would-be statesman is the economy, Burke profoundly disagrees: “the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, callico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection”—a sublime entity, not an economic manager (194). Burke understands, long before Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, that individuals or social fractions must be made admirably “obedient” to the state “by consent or force” (195). Burke has a verdict on mainstream gesture politics too: “When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition [of the state] becomes low and base” (136).Is Malcolm Turnbull so contemptuous of the public that he assumes nobody will notice the gross discrepancies between his own ideals and what Burke stands for? His invocation of Burke is, indeed, “mainstream gesture politics”: on one level, “Burke” signifies nothing more than Turnbull’s performance of himself as a deep thinker. In this process, the real Edmund Burke is historically erased; reduced to the status of stage-prop in the theatrical production of Turnbull’s mass-mediated identity. “Edmund Burke” is re-invented as a term in an aesthetic repertoire.This transmutation of knowledge and history into mere cipher is the staple trick of culture-war discourse. Jennifer Hewett casts Turnbull as “no conservative culture warrior”, but he certainly shows a facility with culture-war rhetoric. And as much as Turnbull “confounds stereotypes” his verbal gesture to Edmund Burke entrenches a stereotype: at another level, the incantation “Edmund Burke” is implicitly meant to connect Turnbull with conservative tradition—in the exact way that John Howard regularly self-nominated as a “Burkean conservative”.This appeal to tradition effectively places “the people” in a power relation. Tradition has a sublimity that is bigger than us; it precedes us and will outlast us. Consequently, for a politician to claim that tradition has fashioned him, that he is welded to it or perhaps even owns it as part of his heritage, is to glibly imply an authority greater than that of “the many, many ordinary people”—Burke’s hair-dressers and tallow-chandlers—whose company he so briefly enjoys.In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton assesses one of Burke’s important legacies, placing him beside another eighteenth-century thinker so loved by the right—Adam Smith. Ideology of the Aesthetic is premised on the view that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body”; that the aesthetic gives form to the “primitive materialism” of human passions and organises “the whole of our sensate life together… a society’s somatic, sensational life” (13). Reading Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Eagleton discerns that society appears as “an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects”, like “any production of human art”. In Smith’s work, the “whole of social life is aestheticized” and people inhabit “a social order so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.” In Burke, Eagleton discovers that the aesthetics of “manners” can be understood in terms of Gramscian hegemony: “in the aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ as it would later be called, the law is always with us, as the very unconscious structure of our life”, and as a result conformity to a dominant ideological order is deeply felt as pleasurable and beautiful (37, 42). When this conservative aesthetic enters the realm of politics, Eagleton contends, the “right turn, from Burke” onwards follows a dark trajectory: “forget about theoretical analysis… view society as a self-grounding organism, all of whose parts miraculously interpenetrate without conflict and require no rational justification. Think with the blood and the body. Remember that tradition is always wiser and richer than one’s own poor, pitiable ego. It is this line of descent, in one of its tributaries, which will lead to the Third Reich” (368–9).2. Jean Baudrillard, the Nazis and Public MemoryIn 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Third Reich’s Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe was on loan to Franco’s forces. On 26 April that year, the Condor Legion bombed the market-town of Guernica: the first deliberate attempt to obliterate an entire town from the air and the first experiment in what became known as “terror bombing”—the targeting of civilians. A legacy of this violence was Pablo Picasso’s monumental canvas Guernica – the best-known anti-war painting in art history.When US Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations on 5 February 2003 to make the case for war on Iraq, he stopped to face the press in the UN building’s lobby. The doorstop was globally televised, packaged as a moment of incredible significance: history in the making. It was also theatre: a moment in which history was staged as “event” and the real traces of history were carefully erased. Millions of viewers world-wide were undoubtedly unaware that the blue backdrop before which Powell stood was specifically designed to cover the full-scale tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica. This one-act, agitprop drama was a splendid example of politics as aesthetic action: a “performance” of history in the making which required the loss of actual historical memory enshrined in Guernica. Powell’s performance took its cues from the culture wars, which require the ceaseless erasure of history and public memory—on this occasion enacted on a breathtaking global, rather than national, scale.Inside the UN chamber, Powell’s performance was equally staged-crafted. As he brandished vials of ersatz anthrax, the power-point behind him (the theatrical set) showed artists’ impressions of imaginary mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Powell was playing lead role in a kind of populist, hyperreal production. It was Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism, no less, as the media space in which Powell acted out the drama was not a secondary representation of reality but a reality of its own; the overheads of mobile weapons labs were simulacra, “models of a real without origins or reality”, pictures referring to nothing but themselves (2). In short, Powell’s performance was anchored in a “semiurgic” aesthetic; and it was a dreadful real-life enactment of Walter Benjamin’s maxim that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (241).For Benjamin, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” Fascism gave “these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.” In turn, this required “the introduction of aesthetics into politics”, the objective of which was “the production of ritual values” (241). Under Adolf Hitler’s Reich, people were able to express themselves but only via the rehearsal of officially produced ritual values: by their participation in the disquisition on what Germany meant and what it meant to be German, by the aesthetic regulation of their passions. As Frederic Spotts’ fine study Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics reveals, this passionate disquisition permeated public and private life, through the artfully constructed total field of national narratives, myths, symbols and iconographies. And the ritualistic reiteration of national values in Nazi Germany hinged on two things: contempt and memory loss.By April 1945, as Berlin fell, Hitler’s contempt for the German people was at its apogee. Hitler ordered a scorched earth operation: the destruction of everything from factories to farms to food stores. The Russians would get nothing, the German people would perish. Albert Speer refused to implement the plan and remembered that “Until then… Germany and Hitler had been synonymous in my mind. But now I saw two entities opposed… A passionate love of one’s country… a leader who seemed to hate his people” (Sereny 472). But Hitler’s contempt for the German people was betrayed in the blusterous pages of Mein Kampf years earlier: “The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous” (165). On the back of this belief, Hitler launched what today would be called a culture war, with its Jewish folk devils, loathsome Marxist intellectuals, incitement of popular passions, invented traditions, historical erasures and constant iteration of values.When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer fled Fascism, landing in the United States, their view of capitalist democracy borrowed from Benjamin and anticipated both Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In their well-know essay on “The Culture Industry”, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, they applied Benjamin’s insight on mass self-expression and the maintenance of property relations and ritual values to American popular culture: “All are free to dance and enjoy themselves”, but the freedom to choose how to do so “proves to be the freedom to choose what is always the same”, manufactured by monopoly capital (161–162). Anticipating Baudrillard, they found a society in which “only the copy appears: in the movie theatre, the photograph; on the radio, the recording” (143). And anticipating Debord’s “perfected denial of man” they found a society where work and leisure were structured by the repetition-compulsion principles of capitalism: where people became consumers who appeared “s statistics on research organization charts” (123). “Culture” came to do people’s thinking for them: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown” (144).In this mass-mediated environment, a culture of repetitions, simulacra, billboards and flickering screens, Adorno and Horkheimer concluded that language lost its historical anchorages: “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes” in precisely the same way that the illusory “free” expression of passions in Germany operated, where words were “debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community” (166).I know that the turf of the culture wars, the US and Australia, are not Fascist states; and I know that “the first one to mention the Nazis loses the argument”. I know, too, that there are obvious shortcomings in Adorno and Horkheimer’s reactions to popular culture and these have been widely criticised. However, I would suggest that there is a great deal of value still in Frankfurt School analyses of what we might call the “authoritarian popular” which can be applied to the conservative prosecution of populist culture wars today. Think, for example, how the concept of a “pseudo folk community” might well describe the earthy, common-sense public constructed and interpellated by right-wing culture warriors: America’s Joe Six-Pack, John Howard’s battlers or Kevin Rudd’s working families.In fact, Adorno and Horkheimer’s observations on language go to the heart of a contemporary culture war strategy. Words lose their history, becoming ciphers and “triggers” in a politicised lexicon. Later, Roland Barthes would write that this is a form of myth-making: “myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things.” Barthes reasoned further that “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types”, generating a “cultural logic” and an ideological re-ordering of the world (142). Types such as “neo-Marxist”, “postmodernist” and “Burkean conservative”.Surely, Benjamin’s assessment that Fascism gives “the people” the occasion to express itself, but only through “values”, describes the right’s pernicious incitement of the mythic “dispossessed mainstream” to reclaim its voice: to shout down the noisy minorities—the gays, greenies, blacks, feminists, multiculturalists and neo-Marxist postmodernists—who’ve apparently been running the show. Even more telling, Benjamin’s insight that the incitement to self-expression is connected to the maintenance of property relations, to economic power, is crucial to understanding the contemptuous conduct of culture wars.3. Jesus Dunked in Urine from Kansas to CronullaAmerican commentator Thomas Frank bases his study What’s the Matter with Kansas? on this very point. Subtitled How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Frank’s book is a striking analysis of the indexation of Chicago School free-market reform and the mobilisation of “explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business policies”; but it is the “economic achievements” of free-market capitalism, “not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars” that are conservatism’s “greatest monuments.” Nevertheless, the culture wars are necessary as Chicago School economic thinking consigns American communities to the rust belt. The promise of “free-market miracles” fails ordinary Americans, Frank reasons, leaving them in “backlash” mode: angry, bewildered and broke. And in this context, culture wars are a convenient form of anger management: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred” by nationalist, populist moralism and free-market fundamentalism (5).When John Howard received the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award, on 6 March 2008, he gave a speech in Washington titled “Sharing Our Common Values”. The nub of the speech was Howard’s revelation that he understood the index of neo-liberal economics and culture wars precisely as Thomas Frank does. Howard told the AEI audience that under his prime ministership Australia had “pursued reform and further modernisation of our economy” and that this inevitably meant “dislocation for communities”. This “reform-dislocation” package needed the palliative of a culture war, with his government preaching the “consistency and reassurance” of “our nation’s traditional values… pride in her history”; his government “became assertive about the intrinsic worth of our national identity. In the process we ended the seemingly endless seminar about that identity which had been in progress for some years.” Howard’s boast that his government ended the “seminar” on national identity insinuates an important point. “Seminar” is a culture-war cipher for intellection, just as “pride” is code for passion; so Howard’s self-proclaimed achievement, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, was to valorise “the blood and the body” over “theoretical analysis”. This speaks stratospheric contempt: ordinary people have their identity fashioned for them; they need not think about it, only feel it deeply and passionately according to “ritual values”. Undoubtedly this paved the way to Cronulla.The rubric of Howard’s speech—“Sharing Our Common Values”—was both a homage to international neo-conservatism and a reminder that culture wars are a trans-national phenomenon. In his address, Howard said that in all his “years in politics” he had not heard a “more evocative political slogan” than Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”—the rhetorical catch-cry for moral re-awakening that launched the culture wars. According to Lawrence Grossberg, America’s culture wars were predicated on the perception that the nation was afflicted by “a crisis of our lack of passion, of not caring enough about the values we hold… a crisis of nihilism which, while not restructuring our ideological beliefs, has undermined our ability to organise effective action on their behalf”; and this “New Right” alarmism “operates in the conjuncture of economics and popular culture” and “a popular struggle by which culture can lead politics” in the passionate pursuit of ritual values (31–2). When popular culture leads politics in this way we are in the zone of the image, myth and Adorno and Horkheimer’s “trigger words” that have lost their history. In this context, McKenzie Wark observes that “radical writers influenced by Marx will see the idea of culture as compensation for a fragmented and alienated life as a con. Guy Debord, perhaps the last of the great revolutionary thinkers of Europe, will call it “the spectacle”’ (20). Adorno and Horkheimer might well have called it “the authoritarian popular”. As Jonathan Charteris-Black’s work capably demonstrates, all politicians have their own idiolect: their personally coded language, preferred narratives and myths; their own vision of who “the people” might or should be that is conjured in their words. But the language of the culture wars is different. It is not a personal idiolect. It is a shared vocabulary, a networked vernacular, a pervasive trans-national aesthetic that pivots on the fact that words like “neo-Marxist”, “postmodern” and “Edmund Burke” have no historical or intellectual context or content: they exist as the ciphers of “values”. And the fact that culture warriors continually mouth them is a supreme act of contempt: it robs the public of its memory. And that’s why, as Lucy and Mickler’s War on Democracy so wittily argues, if there are any postmodernists left they’ll be on the right.Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and, later, Debord and Grossberg understood how the political activation of the popular constitutes a hegemonic project. The result is nothing short of persuading “the people” to collaborate in its own oppression. The activation of the popular is perfectly geared to an age where the main stage of political life is the mainstream media; an age in which, Charteris-Black notes, political classes assume the general antipathy of publics to social change and act on the principle that the most effective political messages are sold to “the people” by an appeal “to familiar experiences”—market populism (10). In her substantial study The Persuaders, Sally Young cites an Australian Labor Party survey, conducted by pollster Rod Cameron in the late 1970s, in which the party’s message machine was finely tuned to this populist position. The survey also dripped with contempt for ordinary people: their “Interest in political philosophy… is very low… They are essentially the products (and supporters) of mass market commercialism”. Young observes that this view of “the people” was the foundation of a new order of political advertising and the conduct of politics on the mass-media stage. Cameron’s profile of “ordinary people” went on to assert that they are fatally attracted to “a moderate leader who is strong… but can understand and represent their value system” (47): a prescription for populist discourse which begs the question of whether the values a politician or party represent via the media are ever really those of “the people”. More likely, people are hegemonised into a value system which they take to be theirs. Writing of the media side of the equation, David Salter raises the point that when media “moguls thunder about ‘the public interest’ what they really mean is ‘what we think the public is interested in”, which is quite another matter… Why this self-serving deception is still so sheepishly accepted by the same public it is so often used to violate remains a mystery” (40).Sally Young’s Persuaders retails a story that she sees as “symbolic” of the new world of mass-mediated political life. The story concerns Mark Latham and his “revolutionary” journeys to regional Australia to meet the people. “When a political leader who holds a public meeting is dubbed a ‘revolutionary’”, Young rightly observes, “something has gone seriously wrong”. She notes how Latham’s “use of old-fashioned ‘meet-and-greet’campaigning methods was seen as a breath of fresh air because it was unlike the type of packaged, stage-managed and media-dependent politics that have become the norm in Australia.” Except that it wasn’t. “A media pack of thirty journalists trailed Latham in a bus”, meaning, that he was not meeting the people at all (6–7). He was traducing the people as participants in a media spectacle, as his “meet and greet” was designed to fill the image-banks of print and electronic media. Even meeting the people becomes a media pseudo-event in which the people impersonate the people for the camera’s benefit; a spectacle as artfully deceitful as Colin Powell’s UN performance on Iraq.If the success of this kind of “self-serving deception” is a mystery to David Salter, it would not be so to the Frankfurt School. For them, an understanding of the processes of mass-mediated politics sits somewhere near the core of their analysis of the culture industries in the “democratic” world. I think the Frankfurt school should be restored to a more important role in the project of cultural studies. Apart from an aversion to jazz and other supposedly “elitist” heresies, thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and their progeny Debord have a functional claim to provide the theory for us to expose the machinations of the politics of contempt and its aesthetic ruses.ReferencesAdorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979. 120–167.Barthes Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. St Albans: Paladin, 1972. 109–58.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–251.Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Charteris-Black, Jonathan. Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004.Grossberg, Lawrence. “It’s a Sin: Politics, Post-Modernity and the Popular.” It’s a Sin: Essays on Postmodern Politics & Culture. Eds. Tony Fry, Ann Curthoys and Paul Patton. Sydney: Power Publications, 1988. 6–71.Hewett, Jennifer. “The Opportunist.” The Weekend Australian Magazine. 25–26 October 2008. 16–22.Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Pimlico, 1993.Howard, John. “Sharing Our Common Values.” Washington: Irving Kristol Lecture, American Enterprise Institute. 5 March 2008. ‹http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,233328945-5014047,00html›.Lucy, Niall and Steve Mickler. The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2006.Pearson, Christopher. “Pray for Sense to Prevail.” The Weekend Australian. 25–26 October 2008. 30.Salter, David. The Media We Deserve: Underachievement in the Fourth Estate. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Sereny, Gitta. Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth. London: Picador, 1996.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. London: Pimlico, 2003.Wark, McKenzie. The Virtual Republic: Australia’s Culture Wars of the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997.Young, Sally. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004.

Introduction Explorations of the multimedia game format within cultural studies have been broadly approached from two perspectives: one -- the impact of technologies on user interaction particularly with regard to social implications, and the other -- human computer interactions within the framework of cybercultures. Another approach to understanding or speaking about games within cultural studies is to focus on the game experience as cultural practice -- as an activity or an event. In this article I wish to initiate an exploration of the aesthetics of player space as a distinctive element of the gameplay experience. In doing so I propose that an understanding of aesthetic spatial issues as an element of player interactivity and engagement is important for understanding the cultural practice of adventure gameplay. In approaching these questions, I am focussing on the single-player exploration adventure game in particular Myst and The Crystal Key. In describing these games as adventures I am drawing on Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design, which although a little dated, focusses on game design as a distinct activity. He brings together a theoretical approach with extensive experience as a game designer himself (Excalibur, Legionnaire, Gossip). Whilst at Atari he also worked with Brenda Laurel, a key theorist in the area of computer design and dramatic structure. Adventure games such as Myst and The Crystal Key might form a sub-genre in Chris Crawford's taxonomy of computer game design. Although they use the main conventions of the adventure game -- essentially a puzzle to be solved with characters within a story context -- the main focus and source of pleasure for the player is exploration, particularly the exploration of worlds or cosmologies. The main gameplay of both games is to travel through worlds solving clues, picking up objects, and interacting with other characters. In Myst the player has to solve the riddle of the world they have entered -- as the CD-ROM insert states "Now you're here, wherever here is, with no option but to explore." The goal, as the player must work out, is to release the father Atrus from prison by bringing magic pages of a book to different locations in the worlds. Hints are offered by broken-up, disrupted video clips shown throughout the game. In The Crystal Key, the player as test pilot has to save a civilisation by finding clues, picking up objects, mending ships and defeating an opponent. The questions foregrounded by a focus on the aesthetics of navigation are: What types of representational context are being set up? What choices have designers made about representational context? How are the players positioned within these spaces? What are the implications for the player's sense of orientation and navigation? Architectural Fabrication For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. The creation of a digital architecture in adventure games mimics the Pompeii wall paintings with their interplay of extruded and painted features. In visualising the space of a cosmology, the environment starts to be coded like the urban or built environment with underlying geometry and textured surface or dressing. In The Making of Myst (packaged with the CD-ROM) Chuck Carter, the artist on Myst, outlines the process of creating Myst Island through painting the terrain in grey scale then extruding the features and adding textural render -- a methodology that lends itself to a hybrid of architectural and painted geometry. Examples of external architecture and of internal room design can be viewed online. In the spatial organisation of the murals of Pompeii and later Rome, orthogonals converged towards several vertical axes showing multiple points of view simultaneously. During the high Renaissance, notions of perspective developed into a more formal system known as the construzione legittima or legitimate construction. This assumed a singular position of the on-looker standing in the same place as that occupied by the artist when the painting was constructed. In Myst there is an exaggeration of the underlying structuring technique of the construzione legittima with its emphasis on geometry and mathematics. The player looks down at a slight angle onto the screen from a fixed vantage point and is signified as being within the cosmological expanse, either in off-screen space or as the cursor. Within the cosmology, the island as built environment appears as though viewed through an enlarging lens, creating the precision and coldness of a Piero della Francesca painting. Myst mixes flat and three-dimensional forms of imagery on the same screen -- the flat, sketchy portrayal of the trees of Myst Island exists side-by-side with the monumental architectural buildings and landscape design structures created in Macromodel. This image shows the flat, almost expressionistic trees of Myst Island juxtaposed with a fountain rendered in high detail. This recalls the work of Giotto in the Arena chapel. In Joachim's Dream, objects and buildings have depth, but trees, plants and sky -- the space in-between objects -- is flat. Myst Island conjures up the realm of a magic, realist space with obsolete artefacts, classic architectural styles (the Albert Hall as the domed launch pad, the British Museum as the library, the vernacular cottage in the wood), mechanical wonders, miniature ships, fountains, wells, macabre torture instruments, ziggurat-like towers, symbols and odd numerological codes. Adam Mates describes it as "that beautiful piece of brain-deadening sticky-sweet eye-candy" but more than mere eye-candy or graphic verisimilitude, it is the mix of cultural ingredients and signs that makes Myst an intriguing place to play. The buildings in The Crystal Key, an exploratory adventure game in a similar genre to Myst, celebrate the machine aesthetic and modernism with Buckminster Fuller style geodesic structures, the bombe shape, exposed ducting, glass and steel, interiors with movable room partitions and abstract expressionist decorations. An image of one of these modernist structures is available online. The Crystal Key uses QuickTime VR panoramas to construct the exterior and interior spaces. Different from the sharp detail of Myst's structures, the focus changes from sharp in wide shot to soft focus in close up, with hot-spot objects rendered in trompe l'oeil detail. The Tactility of Objects "The aim of trompe l'oeil -- using the term in its widest sense and applying it to both painting and objects -- is primarily to puzzle and to mystify" (Battersby 19). In the 15th century, Brunelleschi invented a screen with central apparatus in order to obtain exact perspective -- the monocular vision of the camera obscura. During the 17th century, there was a renewed interest in optics by the Dutch artists of the Rembrandt school (inspired by instruments developed for Dutch seafaring ventures), in particular Vermeer, Hoogstraten, de Hooch and Dou. Gerard Dou's painting of a woman chopping onions shows this. These artists were experimenting with interior perspective and trompe l'oeil in order to depict the minutia of the middle-class, domestic interior. Within these luminous interiors, with their receding tiles and domestic furniture, is an elevation of the significance of rhyparography. In the Girl Chopping Onions of 1646 by Gerard Dou the small things are emphasised -- the group of onions, candlestick holder, dead fowl, metal pitcher, and bird cage. Trompe l'oeil as an illusionist strategy is taken up in the worlds of Myst, The Crystal Key and others in the adventure game genre. Traditionally, the fascination of trompe l'oeil rests upon the tension between the actual painting and the scam; the physical structures and the faux painted structures call for the viewer to step closer to wave at a fly or test if the glass had actually broken in the frame. Mirian Milman describes trompe l'oeil painting in the following manner: "the repertory of trompe-l'oeil painting is made up of obsessive elements, it represents a reality immobilised by nails, held in the grip of death, corroded by time, glimpsed through half-open doors or curtains, containing messages that are sometimes unreadable, allusions that are often misunderstood, and a disorder of seemingly familiar and yet remote objects" (105). Her description could be a scene from Myst with in its suggestion of theatricality, rich texture and illusionistic play of riddle or puzzle. In the trompe l'oeil painterly device known as cartellino, niches and recesses in the wall are represented with projecting elements and mock bas-relief. This architectural trickery is simulated in the digital imaging of extruded and painting elements to give depth to an interior or an object. Other techniques common to trompe l'oeil -- doors, shadowy depths and staircases, half opened cupboard, and paintings often with drapes and curtains to suggest a layering of planes -- are used throughout Myst as transition points. In the trompe l'oeil paintings, these transition points were often framed with curtains or drapes that appeared to be from the spectator space -- creating a painting of a painting effect. Myst is rich in this suggestion of worlds within worlds through the framing gesture afforded by windows, doors, picture frames, bookcases and fireplaces. Views from a window -- a distant landscape or a domestic view, a common device for trompe l'oeil -- are used in Myst to represent passageways and transitions onto different levels. Vertical space is critical for extending navigation beyond the horizontal through the terraced landscape -- the tower, antechamber, dungeon, cellars and lifts of the fictional world. Screen shots show the use of the curve, light diffusion and terracing to invite the player. In The Crystal Key vertical space is limited to the extent of the QTVR tilt making navigation more of a horizontal experience. Out-Stilling the Still Dutch and Flemish miniatures of the 17th century give the impression of being viewed from above and through a focussing lens. As Mastai notes: "trompe l'oeil, therefore is not merely a certain kind of still life painting, it should in fact 'out-still' the stillest of still lifes" (156). The intricate detailing of objects rendered in higher resolution than the background elements creates a type of hyper-reality that is used in Myst to emphasise the physicality and actuality of objects. This ultimately enlarges the sense of space between objects and codes them as elements of significance within the gameplay. The obsessive, almost fetishistic, detailed displays of material artefacts recall the curiosity cabinets of Fabritius and Hoogstraten. The mechanical world of Myst replicates the Dutch 17th century fascination with the optical devices of the telescope, the convex mirror and the prism, by coding them as key signifiers/icons in the frame. In his peepshow of 1660, Hoogstraten plays with an enigma and optical illusion of a Dutch domestic interior seen as though through the wrong end of a telescope. Using the anamorphic effect, the image only makes sense from one vantage point -- an effect which has a contemporary counterpart in the digital morphing widely used in adventure games. The use of crumbled or folded paper standing out from the plane surface of the canvas was a recurring motif of the Vanitas trompe l'oeil paintings. The highly detailed representation and organisation of objects in the Vanitas pictures contained the narrative or symbology of a religious or moral tale. (As in this example by Hoogstraten.) In the cosmology of Myst and The Crystal Key, paper contains the narrative of the back-story lovingly represented in scrolls, books and curled paper messages. The entry into Myst is through the pages of an open book, and throughout the game, books occupy a privileged position as holders of stories and secrets that are used to unlock the puzzles of the game. Myst can be read as a Dantesque, labyrinthine journey with its rich tapestry of images, its multi-level historical associations and battle of good and evil. Indeed the developers, brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, had a fertile background to draw on, from a childhood spent travelling to Bible churches with their nondenominational preacher father. The Diorama as System Event The diorama (story in the round) or mechanical exhibit invented by Daguerre in the 19th century created a mini-cosmology with player anticipation, action and narrative. It functioned as a mini-theatre (with the spectator forming the fourth wall), offering a peek into mini-episodes from foreign worlds of experience. The Musée Mechanique in San Francisco has dioramas of the Chinese opium den, party on the captain's boat, French execution scenes and ghostly graveyard episodes amongst its many offerings, including a still showing an upper class dancing party called A Message from the Sea. These function in tandem with other forbidden pleasures of the late 19th century -- public displays of the dead, waxwork museums and kinetescope flip cards with their voyeuristic "What the Butler Saw", and "What the Maid Did on Her Day Off" tropes. Myst, along with The 7th Guest, Doom and Tomb Raider show a similar taste for verisimilitude and the macabre. However, the pre-rendered scenes of Myst and The Crystal Key allow for more diorama like elaborate and embellished details compared to the emphasis on speed in the real-time-rendered graphics of the shoot-'em-ups. In the gameplay of adventure games, animated moments function as rewards or responsive system events: allowing the player to navigate through the seemingly solid wall; enabling curtains to be swung back, passageways to appear, doors to open, bookcases to disappear. These short sequences resemble the techniques used in mechanical dioramas where a coin placed in the slot enables a curtain or doorway to open revealing a miniature narrative or tableau -- the closure of the narrative resulting in the doorway shutting or the curtain being pulled over again. These repeating cycles of contemplation-action-closure offer the player one of the rewards of the puzzle solution. The sense of verisimilitude and immersion in these scenes is underscored by the addition of sound effects (doors slamming, lifts creaking, room atmosphere) and music. Geographic Locomotion Static imagery is the standard backdrop of the navigable space of the cosmology game landscape. Myst used a virtual camera around a virtual set to create a sequence of still camera shots for each point of view. The use of the still image lends itself to a sense of the tableauesque -- the moment frozen in time. These tableauesque moments tend towards the clean and anaesthetic, lacking any evidence of the player's visceral presence or of other human habitation. The player's navigation from one tableau screen to the next takes the form of a 'cyber-leap' or visual jump cut. These jumps -- forward, backwards, up, down, west, east -- follow on from the geographic orientation of the early text-based adventure games. In their graphic form, they reveal a new framing angle or point of view on the scene whilst ignoring the rules of classical continuity editing. Games such as The Crystal Key show the player's movement through space (from one QTVR node to another) by employing a disorientating fast zoom, as though from the perspective of a supercharged wheelchair. Rather than reconciling the player to the state of movement, this technique tends to draw attention to the technologies of the programming apparatus. The Crystal Key sets up a meticulous screen language similar to filmic dramatic conventions then breaks its own conventions by allowing the player to jump out of the crashed spaceship through the still intact window. The landscape in adventure games is always partial, cropped and fragmented. The player has to try and map the geographical relationship of the environment in order to understand where they are and how to proceed (or go back). Examples include selecting the number of marker switches on the island to receive Atrus's message and the orientation of Myst's tower in the library map to obtain key clues. A screenshot shows the arrival point in Myst from the dock. In comprehending the landscape, which has no centre, the player has to create a mental map of the environment by sorting significant connecting elements into chunks of spatial elements similar to a Guy Debord Situationist map. Playing the Flaneur The player in Myst can afford to saunter through the landscape, meandering at a more leisurely pace that would be possible in a competitive shoot-'em-up, behaving as a type of flaneur. The image of the flaneur as described by Baudelaire motions towards fin de siècle decadence, the image of the socially marginal, the dispossessed aristocrat wandering the urban landscape ready for adventure and unusual exploits. This develops into the idea of the artist as observer meandering through city spaces and using the power of memory in evoking what is observed for translation into paintings, writing or poetry. In Myst, the player as flaneur, rather than creating paintings or writing, is scanning the landscape for clues, witnessing objects, possible hints and pick-ups. The numbers in the keypad in the antechamber, the notes from Atrus, the handles on the island marker, the tower in the forest and the miniature ship in the fountain all form part of a mnemomic trompe l'oeil. A screenshot shows the path to the library with one of the island markers and the note from Atrus. In the world of Myst, the player has no avatar presence and wanders around a seemingly unpeopled landscape -- strolling as a tourist venturing into the unknown -- creating and storing a mental map of objects and places. In places these become items for collection -- cultural icons with an emphasised materiality. In The Crystal Key iconography they appear at the bottom of the screen pulsing with relevance when active. A screenshot shows a view to a distant forest with the "pick-ups" at the bottom of the screen. This process of accumulation and synthesis suggests a Surrealist version of Joseph Cornell's strolls around Manhattan -- collecting, shifting and organising objects into significance. In his 1982 taxonomy of game design, Chris Crawford argues that without competition these worlds are not really games at all. That was before the existence of the Myst adventure sub-genre where the pleasures of the flaneur are a particular aspect of the gameplay pleasures outside of the rules of win/loose, combat and dominance. By turning the landscape itself into a pathway of significance signs and symbols, Myst, The Crystal Key and other games in the sub-genre offer different types of pleasures from combat or sport -- the pleasures of the stroll -- the player as observer and cultural explorer. References Battersby, M. Trompe L'Oeil: The Eye Deceived. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. Original publication 1982, book out of print. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.php>. Darley Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Lunenfeld, P. Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P 1999. Mates, A. Effective Illusory Worlds: A Comparative Analysis of Interfaces in Contemporary Interactive Fiction. 1998. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://www.wwa.com/~mathes/stuff/writings>. Mastai, M. L. d'Orange. Illusion in Art, Trompe L'Oeil: A History of Pictorial Illusion. New York: Abaris, 1975. Miller, Robyn and Rand. "The Making of Myst." Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Milman, M. Trompe-L'Oeil: The Illusion of Reality. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1982. Murray, J. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Cyberspace from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999. Game References 7th Guest. Trilobyte, Inc., distributed by Virgin Games, 1993. Doom. Id Software, 1992. Excalibur. Chris Crawford, 1982. Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos Interactive, 1996. The Crystal Key. Dreamcatcher Interactive, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Bernadette Flynn. "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php>. Chicago style: Bernadette Flynn, "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Bernadette Flynn. (2000) Towards an aesthetics of navigation -- spatial organisation in the cosmology of the adventure game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]).

There is, in our sense of place, little cognisance of what lies underground. Yet our sense of place, instinctive, unconscious, primeval, has its own underground: the secret spaces which mirror our insides; the world beneath the skin. Our roots lie beneath the ground, with the minerals and the dead. (Hughes 83) The-Home-and-Away-Game Imagine the earth-grounded, “diagrammatological” trajectory of a footballer who as one member of a team is psyching himself up before the start of a game. The siren blasts its trumpet call. The footballer bursts out of the pavilion (where this psyching up has taken place) to engage in the opening bounce or kick of the game. And then: running, leaping, limping after injury, marking, sliding, kicking, and possibly even passing out from concussion. Finally, the elation accompanying the final siren, after which hugs, handshakes and raised fists conclude the actual match on the football oval. This exit from the pavilion, the course the player takes during the game itself, and return to the pavilion, forms a combination of stasis and movement, and a return to exhausted stasis again, that every player engages with regardless of the game code. Examined from a “diagrammatological” perspective, a perspective Rowan Wilken (following in the path of Gilles Deleuze and W. J. T. Mitchell) understands as “a generative process: a ‘metaphor’ or way of thinking — diagrammatic, diagrammatological thinking — which in turn, is linked to poetic thinking” (48), this footballer’s scenario arises out of an aerial perspective that depicts the actual spatial trajectory the player takes during the course of a game. It is a diagram that is digitally encoded via a sensor on the footballer’s body, and being an electronically encoded diagram it can also make available multiple sets of data such as speed, heartbeat, blood pressure, maybe even brain-wave patterns. From this limited point of view there is only one footballer’s playing trajectory to consider; various groupings within the team, the whole team itself, and the diagrammatological depiction of its games with various other teams might also be possible. This singular imagining though is itself an actuality: as a diagram it is encoded as a graphic image by a satellite hovering around the earth with a Global Positioning System (GPS) reading the sensor attached to the footballer which then digitally encodes this diagrammatological trajectory for appraisal later by the player, coach, team and management. In one respect, this practice is another example of a willing self-surveillance critical to explaining the reflexive subject and its attribute of continuous self-improvement. According to Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club, this is a technique the club uses as a part of game/play assessment, a system that can provide a “running map” for each player equipped with such a tracking device during a game. As the Fremantle Club’s Strength and Conditioning Coach Ben Tarbox says of this tactic, “We’re getting a physiological profile that has started to build a really good picture of how individual players react during a game” (21). With a little extra effort (and some sizeable computer processing grunt) this two dimensional linear graphic diagram of a footballer working the football ground could also form the raw material for a three-dimensional animation, maybe a virtual reality game, even a hologram. It could also be used to sideline a non-performing player. Now try another related but different imagining: what if this diagrammatological trajectory could be enlarged a little to include the possibility that this same player’s movements could be mapped out by the idea of home-and-away games; say over the course of a season, maybe even a whole career, for instance? No doubt, a wide range of differing diagrammatological perspectives might suggest themselves. My own particular refinement of this movement/stasis on the footballer’s part suggests my own distinctive comings and goings to and from my own specific piece of home country. And in this incessantly domestic/real world reciprocity, in this diurnally repetitive leaving and coming back to home country, might it be plausible to think of “Home as Capital of the Region”? If, as Walter Benjamin suggests in the prelude to his monumental Arcades Project, “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” could it be that both in and through my comings and goings to and from this selfsame home country, my own burgeoning sense of regionality is constituted in every minute-by-minutiae of lived experience? Could it be that this feeling about home is manifested in my every day-to-night manoeuvre of home-and-away-and-away-and-home-making, of every singular instance of exit, play/engage, and the return home? “Home, Capital of the Region” then examines the idea that my home is that part of the country which is the still-point of eternal return, the bedrock to which I retreat after the daily grind, and the point from which I start out and do it all again the next day. It employs, firstly, this ‘diagrammatological’ perspective to illustrate the point that this stasis/movement across country can make an electronic record of my own psychic self-surveillance and actualisation in-situ. And secondly, the architectural plan of the domestic home (examined through the perspective of critical regionalism) is used as a conduit to illustrate how I am physically embedded in country. Lastly, intermingling these digressive threads is chora, Plato’s notion of embodied place and itself an ancient regional rendering of this eternal return to the beginning, the place where the essential diversity of country decisively enters the soul. Chora: Core of Regionality Kevin Lynch writes that, “Our senses are local, while our experience is regional” (10), a combination that suggests this regional emphasis on home-and-away-making might be a useful frame of reference (simultaneously spatiotemporal, both a visceral and encoded communication) for me to include as a crucial vector in my own life-long learning package. Regionality (as, variously, a sub-generic categorisation and an extension/concentration of nationality, as well as a recently re-emerged friend/antagonist to a global understanding) infuses my world of home with a grounded footing in country, one that is a site of an Eternal Return to the Beginning in the micro-world of the everyday. This is a point John Sallis discusses at length in his analysis of Plato’s Timaeus and its founding notion of regionality: chora. More extended absences away from home-base are of course possible but one’s return to home on most days and for most nights is a given of post/modern, maybe even of ancient everyday experience. Even for the continually shifting nomad, nightfall in some part of the country brings the rest and recreation necessary for the next day’s wanderings. This fundamental question of an Eternal Return to the Beginning arises as a crucial element of the method in Plato’s Timaeus, a seemingly “unstructured” mythic/scientific dialogue about the origins and structure of both the psychically and the physically implaced world. In the Timaeus, “incoherence is especially obvious in the way the natural sequence in which a narrative would usually unfold is interrupted by regressions, corrections, repetitions, and abrupt new beginnings” (Gadamer 160). Right in the middle of the Timaeus, in between its sections on the “Work of Reason” and the “Work of Necessity”, sits chora, both an actual spatial and bodily site where my being intersects with my becoming, and where my lived life criss-crosses the various arts necessary to articulating a recorded version of that life. Every home is a grounded chora-logical timespace harness guiding its occupant’s thoughts, feelings and actions. My own regionally implaced chora (an example of which is the diagrammatological trajectory already outlined above as my various everyday comings and goings, of me acting in and projecting myself into context) could in part be understood as a graphical realisation of the extent of my movements and stationary rests in my own particular timespace trajectory. The shorthand for this process is ‘embedded’. Gregory Ulmer writes of chora that, “While chorography as a term is close to choreography, it duplicates a term that already exists in the discipline of geography, thus establishing a valuable resonance for a rhetoric of invention concerned with the history of ‘place’ in relation to memory” (Heuretics 39, original italics). Chorography is the geographic discipline for the systematic study and analysis of regions. Chora, home, country and regionality thus form an important multi-dimensional zone of interplay in memorialising the game of everyday life. In light of these observations I might even go so far as to suggest that this diagrammatological trajectory (being both digital and GPS originated) is part of the increasingly electrate condition that guides the production of knowledge in any global/regional context. This last point is a contextual connection usefully examined in Alan J. Scott’s Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order and Michael Storper’s The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. Their analyses explicitly suggest that the symbiosis between globalisation and regionalisation has been gathering pace since at least the end of World War Two and the Bretton Woods agreement. Our emerging understanding of electracy also happens to be Gregory Ulmer’s part-remedy for shifting the ground under the intense debates surrounding il/literacy in the current era (see, in particular, Internet Invention). And, for Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow’s analysis of “Australian Everyday Cultures” (“Media Culture and the Home” 57–86), it is within the home that our un.conscious understanding of electronic media is at its most intense, a pattern that emerges in the longer term through receiving telegrams, compiling photo albums, listening to the radio, home- and video-movies, watching the evening news on television, and logging onto the computer in the home-office, media-room or home-studio. These various generalisations (along with this diagrammatological view of my comings and goings to and from the built space of home), all point indiscriminately to a productive confusion surrounding the sedentary and nomadic opposition/conjunction. If natural spaces are constituted in nouns like oceans, forests, plains, grasslands, steppes, deserts, rivers, tidal interstices, farmland etc. (and each categorisation here relies on the others for its existence and demarcation) then built space is often seen as constituting its human sedentary equivalent. For Deleuze and Guatteri (in A Thousand Plateaus, “1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine”) these natural spaces help instigate a nomadic movement across localities and regions. From a nomadology perspective, these smooth spaces unsettle a scientific, numerical calculation, sometimes even aesthetic demarcation and order. If they are marked at all, it is by heterogenous and differential forces, energised through constantly oscillating intensities. A Thousand Plateaus is careful though not to elevate these smooth nomadic spaces over the more sedentary spaces of culture and power (372–373). Nonetheless, as Edward S. Casey warns, “In their insistence on becoming and movement, however, the authors of A Thousand Plateaus overlook the placial potential of settled dwelling — of […] ‘built places’” (309, original italics). Sedentary, settled dwelling centred on home country may have a crust of easy legibility and order about it but it also formats a locally/regionally specific nomadic quality, a point underscored above in the diagrammatological perspective. The sedentary tendency also emerges once again in relation to home in the architectural drafting of the domestic domicile. The Real Estate Revolution When Captain Cook planted the British flag in the sand at Botany Bay in 1770 and declared the country it spiked as Crown Land and henceforth will come under the ownership of an English sovereign, it was also the moment when white Australia’s current fascination with real estate was conceived. In the wake of this spiking came the intense anxiety over Native Title that surfaced in late twentieth century Australia when claims of Indigenous land grabs would repossess suburban homes. While easily dismissed as hyperbole, a rhetorical gesture intended to arouse this very anxiety, its emergence is nonetheless an indication of the potential for political and psychic unsettling at the heart of the ownership and control of built place, or ‘settled dwelling’ in the Australian context. And here it would be wise to include not just the gridded, architectural quality of home-building and home-making, but also the home as the site of the family romance, another source of unsettling as much as a peaceful calming. Spreading out from the boundaries of the home are the built spaces of fences, bridges, roads, railways, airport terminals (along with their interconnecting pathways), which of course brings us back to the communications infrastructure which have so often followed alongside the development of transport infrastructure. These and other elements represent this conglomerate of built space, possibly the most significant transformation of natural space that humanity has brought about. For the purposes of this meditation though it is the more personal aspect of built space — my home and regional embeddedness, along with their connections into the global electrosphere — that constitutes the primary concern here. For a sedentary, striated space to settle into an unchallenged existence though requires a repression of the highest order, primarily because of the home’s proximity to everyday life, of the latter’s now fading ability to sometimes leave its presuppositions well enough alone. In settled, regionally experienced space, repressions are more difficult to abstract away, they are lived with on a daily basis, which also helps to explain the extra intensity brought to their sometimes-unsettling quality. Inversely, and encased in this globalised electro-spherical ambience, home cannot merely be a place where one dwells within avoiding those presuppositions, I take them with me when I travel and they come back with me from afar. This is a point obliquely reflected in Pico Iyer’s comment that “Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere” (185). While our sense of home may well be, according to J. Douglas Porteous, “the territorial core” of our being, when other arrangements of space and knowledge shift it must inevitably do so as well. In these shifts of spatial affiliation (aided and abetted by regionalisation, globalisation and electronic knowledge), the built place of home can no longer be considered exclusively under the illusion of an autonomous sanctuary wholly guaranteed by capitalist property relations, one of the key factors in its attraction. These shifts in the cultural, economic and psychic relation of home to country are important to a sense of local and regional implacement. The “feeling” of autonomy and security involved in home occupation and/or ownership designates a component of this implacement, a point leading to Eric Leed’s comment that, “By the sixteenth century, literacy had become one of the definitive signs — along with the possession of property and a permanent residence — of an independent social status” (53). Globalising and regionalising forces make this feeling of autonomy and security dynamic, shifting the ground of home, work-place practices and citizenship allegiances in the process. Gathering these wide-ranging forces impacting on psychic and built space together is the emergence of critical regionalism as a branch of architectonics, considered here as a theory of domestic architecture. Critical Regionality Critical regionalism emerged out of the collective thinking of Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism), and as these authors themselves acknowledge, was itself deeply influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford during the first part of the twentieth century when he was arguing against the authority of the international style in architecture, a style epitomised by the Bauhaus movement. It is Kenneth Frampton’s essay, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” that deliberately takes this question of critical regionalism and makes it a part of a domestic architectonic project. In many ways the ideas critical regionalism espouses can themselves be a microcosm of this concomitantly emerging global/regional polis. With public examples of built-form the power of the centre is on display by virtue of a building’s enormous size and frequently high-cultural aesthetic power. This is a fact restated again and again from the ancient world’s agora to Australia’s own political bunker — its Houses of Parliament in Canberra. While Frampton discusses a range of aspects dealing with the universal/implaced axis across his discussion, it is points five and six that deserve attention from a domestically implaced perspective. Under the sub-heading, “Culture Versus Nature: Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form” is where he writes that, Here again, one touches in concrete terms this fundamental opposition between universal civilization and autochthonous culture. The bulldozing of an irregular topography into a flat site is clearly a technocratic gesture which aspires to a condition of absolute placelessness, whereas the terracing of the same site to receive the stepped form of a building is an engagement in the act of “cultivating” the site. (26, original italics) The “totally flat datum” that the universalising tendency sometimes presupposes is, within the critical regionalist perspective, an erroneous assumption. The “cultivation” of a site for the design of a building illustrates the point that built space emerges out of an interaction between parallel phenomena as they contrast and/or converge in a particular set of timespace co-ordinates. These are phenomena that could include (but are not limited to) geomorphic data like soil and rock formations, seismic activity, inclination and declension; climatic considerations in the form of wind patterns, temperature variations, rainfall patterns, available light and dark, humidity and the like; the building context in relation to the cardinal points of north, south, east, and west, along with their intermediary positions. There are also architectural considerations in the form of available building materials and personnel to consider. The social, psychological and cultural requirements of the building’s prospective in-dwellers are intermingled with all these phenomena. This is not so much a question of where to place the air conditioning system but the actuality of the way the building itself is placed on its site, or indeed if that site should be built on at all. A critical regionalist building practice, then, is autochthonous to the degree that a full consideration of this wide range of in-situ interactions is taken into consideration in the development of its design plan. And given this autochthonous quality of the critical regionalist project, it also suggests that the architectural design plan itself (especially when it utilised in conjunction with CAD and virtual reality simulations), might be the better model for designing electrate-centred projects rather than writing or even the script. The proliferation of ‘McMansions’ across many Australian suburbs during the 1990s (generally, oversized domestic buildings designed in the abstract with little or no thought to the above mentioned elements, on bulldozed sites, with powerful air-conditioning systems, and no verandas or roof eves to speak of) demonstrates the continuing influence of a universal, centralising dogma in the realm of built place. As summer temperatures start to climb into the 40°C range all these air-conditioners start to hum in unison, which in turn raises the susceptibility of the supporting infrastructure to collapse under the weight of an overbearing electrical load. The McMansion is a clear example of a built form that is envisioned more so in a drafting room, a space where the architect is remote-sensing the locational specificities. In this envisioning (driven more by a direct line-of-sight idiom dominant in “flat datum” and economic considerations rather than architectural or experiential ones), the tactile is subordinated, which is the subject of Frampton’s sixth point: It is symptomatic of the priority given to sight that we find it necessary to remind ourselves that the tactile is an important dimension in the perception of built form. One has in mind a whole range of complementary sensory perceptions which are registered by the labile body: the intensity of light, darkness, heat and cold; the feeling of humidity; the aroma of material; the almost palpable presence of masonry as the body senses it own confinement; the momentum of an induced gait and the relative inertia of the body as it traverses the floor; the echoing resonance of our own footfall. (28) The point here is clear: in its wider recognition of, and the foregrounding of my body’s full range of sensate capacities in relation to both natural and built space, the critical regionalist approach to built form spreads its meaning-making capacities across a broader range of knowledge modalities. This tactility is further elaborated in more thoroughly personal ways by Margaret Morse in her illuminating essay, “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam”. Paradoxically, this synaesthetic, syncretic approach to bodily meaning-making in a built place, regional milieu intensely concentrates the site-centred locus of everyday life, while simultaneously, the electronic knowledge that increasingly underpins it expands both my body’s and its region’s knowledge-making possibilities into a global gestalt, sometimes even a cosmological one. It is a paradoxical transformation that makes us look anew at social, cultural and political givens, even objective and empirical understandings, especially as they are articulated through national frames of reference. Domestic built space then is a kind of micro-version of the multi-function polis where work, pleasure, family, rest, public display and privacy intermingle. So in both this reduction and expansion in the constitution of domestic home life, one that increasingly represents the location of the production of knowledge, built place represents a concentration of energy that forces us to re-imagine border-making, order, and the dynamic interplay of nomadic movement and sedentary return, a point that echoes Nicolas Rothwell’s comment that “every exile has in it a homecoming” (80). Albeit, this is a knowledge-making milieu with an expanded range of modalities incorporated and expressed through a wide range of bodily intensities not simply cognitive ones. Much of the ambiguous discontent manifested in McMansion style domiciles across many Western countries might be traced to the fact that their occupants have had little or no say in the way those domiciles have been designed and/or constructed. In Heidegger’s terms, they have not thought deeply enough about “dwelling” in that building, although with the advent of the media room the question of whether a “building” securely borders both “dwelling” and “thinking” is now open to question. As anxieties over border-making at all scales intensifies, the complexities and un/sureties of natural and built space take ever greater hold of the psyche, sometimes through the advance of a “high level of critical self-consciousness”, a process Frampton describes as a “double mediation” of world culture and local conditions (21). Nearly all commentators warn of a nostalgic, romantic or a sentimental regionalism, the sum total of which is aimed at privileging the local/regional and is sometimes utilised as a means of excluding the global or universal, sometimes even the national (Berry 67). Critical regionalism is itself a mediating factor between these dispositions, working its methods and practices through my own psyche into the local, the regional, the national and the global, rejecting and/or accepting elements of these domains, as my own specific context, in its multiplicity, demands it. If the politico-economic and cultural dimensions of this global/regional world have tended to undermine the process of border-making across a range of scales, we can see in domestic forms of built place the intense residue of both their continuing importance and an increased dependency on this electro-mediated world. This is especially apparent in those domiciles whose media rooms (with their satellite dishes, telephone lines, computers, television sets, games consuls, and music stereos) are connecting them to it in virtuality if not in reality. Indeed, the thought emerges (once again keeping in mind Eric Leed’s remark on the literate-configured sense of autonomy that is further enhanced by a separate physical address and residence) that the intense importance attached to domestically orientated built place by globally/regionally orientated peoples will figure as possibly the most viable means via which this sense of autonomy will transfer to electronic forms of knowledge. If, however, this here domestic habitué turns his gaze away from the screen that transports me into this global/regional milieu and I focus my attention on the physicality of the building in which I dwell, I once again stand in the presence of another beginning. This other beginning is framed diagrammatologically by the building’s architectural plans (usually conceived in either an in-situ, autochthonous, or a universal manner), and is a graphical conception that anchors my body in country long after the architects and builders have packed up their tools and left. This is so regardless of whether a home is built, bought, rented or squatted in. Ihab Hassan writes that, “Home is not where one is pushed into the light, but where one gathers it into oneself to become light” (417), an aphorism that might be rephrased as follows: “Home is not where one is pushed into the country, but where one gathers it into oneself to become country.” For the in-and-out-and-around-and-about domestic dweller of the twenty-first century, then, home is where both regional and global forms of country decisively enter the soul via the conduits of the virtuality of digital flows and the reality of architectural footings. Acknowledgements I’m indebted to both David Fosdick and Phil Roe for alerting me to the importance to the Fremantle Dockers Football Club. The research and an original draft of this essay were carried out under the auspices of a PhD scholarship from Central Queensland University, and from whom I would also like to thank Denis Cryle and Geoff Danaher for their advice. References Benjamin, Walter. “Paris — the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Quintin Hoare. London: New Left Books, 1973. 155–176. Bennett, Tony, Michael Emmison and John Frow. Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Berry, Wendell. “The Regional Motive.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. San Diego: Harcourt Brace. 63–70. Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin Boundas. Trans. Constantin Boundas and Jacqueline Code. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 193–200. Frampton, Kenneth. “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 16–30. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus.” Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans. P. Christopher Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980. 156–193. Hassan, Ihab. “How Australian Is It?” The Best Australian Essays. Ed. Peter Craven. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000. 405–417. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 145–161. Hughes, John. The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays. Sydney: Giramondo, 2004. Iyer, Pico. “Australia 1988: Five Thousand Miles from Anywhere.” Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World. London: Jonathon Cape, 1993. 173–190. “Keeping Track.” Docker, Official Magazine of the Fremantle Football Club. Edition 3, September (2005): 21. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, 1980. 41–61. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. “The Suppression and Rethinking of Regionalism and Tropicalism After 1945.” Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of Globalization. Eds. Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Bruno Stagno. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2001. 14–58. Lefaivre, Liane and Alexander Tzonis. Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World. New York: Prestel, 2003. Lynch, Kevin. Managing the Sense of a Region. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT P, 1976. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Diagrammatology.” Critical Inquiry 7.3 (1981): 622–633. Morse, Margaret. “Home: Smell, Taste, Posture, Gleam.” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place. Ed. Hamid Naficy. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. 63–74. Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Desmond Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973. Porteous, J. Douglas. “Home: The Territorial Core.” Geographical Review LXVI (1976): 383-390. Rothwell, Nicolas. Wings of the Kite-Hawk: A Journey into the Heart of Australia. Sydney: Pidador, 2003. Sallis, John. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indianapolis UP, 1999. Scott, Allen J. Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Storper, Michael. The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy. New York: The Guildford Press, 1997. Ulmer, Gregory L. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention. New York: John Hopkins UP, 1994. Ulmer, Gregory. Internet Invention: Literacy into Electracy. Longman: Boston, 2003. Wilken, Rowan. “Diagrammatology.” Illogic of Sense: The Gregory Ulmer Remix. Eds. Darren Tofts and Lisa Gye. Alt-X Press, 2007. 48–60. Available at http://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html. (Retrieved 12 June 2007)

IntroductionNew Orleans is one of a number of infamous swamp cities—cities built in swamps, near them or on land “reclaimed” from them, such as London, Paris, Venice, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Petersburg, and Perth. New Orleans seemed to be winning the battle against the swamps until Hurricane Katrina of 2005, or at least participating in an uneasy truce between its unviable location and the forces of the weather to the point that the former was forgotten until the latter intruded as a stark reminder of its history and geography. Around the name “Katrina” a whole series of events and images congregate, including those of photographer Robert Polidori in his monumental book, After the Flood. Katrina, and the exacerbating factors of global warming and drained wetlands, and their impacts, especially on the city of New Orleans (both its infrastructure and residents), point to the cultural construction and production of the disaster. This suite of occurrences is a salutary instance of the difficulties of trying to maintain a hard and fast divide between nature and culture (Hirst and Woolley 23; Giblett, Body 16–17) and the need to think and live them together (Giblett, People and Places). A hurricane is in some sense a natural event, but in the age of global warming it is also a cultural occurrence; a flood produced by a river breaking its banks is a natural event, but a flood caused by breeched levees and drained wetlands is a cultural occurrence; people dying is a natural event, but people dying by drowning in a large and iconic American city created by drainage of wetlands is a cultural disaster of urban planning and relief logistics; and a city set in a swamp is natural and cultural, with the cultural usually antithetical to the natural. “Katrina” is a salutary instance of the cultural and natural operating together in and as “one single catastrophe” of history, as Benjamin (392) put it, and of geography I would add in the will to fill, drain, or reclaim wetlands. Rather than a series of catastrophes proceeding one after the other through history, Benjamin's (392) “Angel of History” sees one single catastrophe of history. This single catastrophe, however, occurs not only in time, in history, but also in space, in a place, in geography. The “Angel of Geography” sees one single catastrophe of geography of wetlands dredged, filled, and reclaimed, cities set in them and cities being re-reclaimed by them in storms and floods. In the case of “Katrina,” the catastrophe of history and geography is tied up with the creation, destruction, and recreation of New Orleans in its swampy location on the Mississippi delta.New OrleansNew Orleans is not only “the nation’s quintessential river city” as Kelman (199) puts it, but also one of a number of infamous swamp cities. In his post-Katrina preface to his study of New Orleans as what he calls “an unnatural metropolis,” Colten notes:While other cities have occupied wetlands, few have the combination of poorly-drained and flood-susceptible territory of New Orleans. Portions of Washington, D.C. occupied wetlands, but there was ample solid ground above the reach of the Potomac [River’s] worst floods. Chicago’s founders platted their city on a wetland site, but the sluggish Chicago River did not drain the massive territory of the Mississippi. (5)“Occupied” is arguably a euphemism for dredging, draining, filling, and reclaiming wetlands. Occupation also conjures up visions of an occupying army, which may be appropriate in the case of New Orleans as the Army Corps of Engineers have spearheaded much of the militarisation by dredging and draining wetlands in New Orleans and elsewhere in the U.S.The location for the city was not propitious. Wilson describes how “the city itself was constructed on an uneven patch of relatively high ground in the midst of a vast swamp” (86). New Orleans for Kelman “is surrounded by a wet world composed of terrain that is not quite land” (22) with the Mississippi River delta on one side and Lake Pontchartrain and the “backswamps” on the other, though the latter were later drained. The Mississippi River for Kelman is “the continent’s most famed and largest watercourse” (199). Perhaps it is also the continent’s most tamed and leveed watercourse. Earlier Kelman related how a prominent local commentator in 1847 “personified the Mississippi as a nurturing mother” because the river “hugged New Orleans to its ‘broad bosom’” (79). Supposedly this mother was the benign, malign, and patriarchal Mother Nature of the leveed river and not the recalcitrant, matrifocal Great Goddess of the swamps that threatened to break the levees and flood the city (see Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands; People and Places, especially Chapter 1). The Mississippi as the mother of all American rivers gave birth to the city of New Orleans at her “mouth,” or more precisely at the other end of her anatomy with the wetland delta as womb. Because of its location at the “mouth” of the Mississippi River, New Orleans for Flint was “historically the most important port in the United States” (230). Yet by the late 1860s the river was seen by New Orleanians, Kelman argues, only as “an alimentary canal, filled with raw waste and decaying animal carcasses” (124). The “mouth” of the river had ceased to be womb and had become anus; the delta had ceased to be womb and had become bowel. The living body of the earth was dying. The river, Kelman concludes, was “not sublime” and had become “an interstate highway” (146). The Angel of Geography sees the single catastrophe of wetlands enacted in the ways in which the earth is figured in a politics of spaces and places. Ascribing the qualities of one place to another to valorise one place and denigrate another and to figure one pejoratively or euphemistically (as in this case) is “placist” (Giblett, Landscapes 8 and 36). Deconstructing and decolonising placism and its use of such figures can lead to a more eco-friendly figuration of spaces and places. New Orleans is one place to do so.What Colten calls “the swampy mire behind New Orleans” was drained in the first 40 years of the twentieth century (46). Colten concludes that, “by the 1930s, drainage and landfilling efforts had successfully reclaimed wetland between the city and the lake, and in the post-war years similar campaigns dewatered marshlands for tract housing eastward and westward from the city” (140–1). For Wilson “much of New Orleans’s history can be seen as a continuing battle with the swamp” (86). New Orleans was a frontline in the modern war against wetlands, the kind of war that Fascists such as Mussolini liked to fight because they were so easy to win (see Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands 115). Many campaigns were fought against wetlands using the modern weapons of monstrous dredgers. The city had struck what Kelman calls “a Faustian bargain with the levees-only policy” (168). In other words, it had sold its soul to the devil of modern industrial technology in exchange for temporary power. New Orleans tried to dominate wetlands with the ironic result that not only “efforts to drain the city dominate early New Orleans history into the present day” as Wilson (86) puts it, but also that these efforts occasionally failed with devastating results. The city became dominated by the waters it had sought to dominate in an irony of history and geography not lost on the student of wetlands. Katrina was the means that reversed the domination of wetlands by the city. Flint argues that “Katrina’s wake-up call made it unconscionable to keep building on fragile coastlines […] and in floodplains” (232–3). And in swamps, I would add. Colten “traces the public’s abandonment of the belief that the city is no place for a swamp” (163). The city is also no place for the artificial swamp of the aftermath of Katrina depicted by Polidori. As the history of New Orleans attests, the swamp is no place for a city in the first place when it is being built, and the city is no place for a swamp in the second place when it is being ravaged by a hurricane and storm surges. City is antithetical and inimical to swamp. They are mutually exclusive. New Orleans for Wilson is “a city on a swamp” (90 my emphasis). In the 1927 flood (Wilson 111), for Kelman “one of the worst flood years in history” (157), and in the 2005 hurricane, the worst flood year so far in its history, New Orleans was transformed into a city of a swamp. The 1927 flood was at the time, and as Kelman puts it, “the worst ‘natural’ disaster in U.S. history” (161), only to be surpassed by the 2005 flood in New Orleans and the 2012 floods in north-eastern U.S. in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in which the drained marshlands of New York and New Jersey returned with a vengeance. In all these cases the swamp outside the city, or before the city, came into the city, became now. The swamp in the past returned in the present; the absent swamp asserted its presence. The historical barriers between city and swamp were removed. KatrinaKatrina for Kelman (xviii) was not a natural disaster. Katrina produced “water […] out of place” (Kelman x). In other words, and in Mary Douglas’s terms for whom dirt is matter out of place (Douglas 2), this water was dirt. It was not merely that the water was dirty in colour or composition but that the water was in the wrong place, in the buildings and streets, and not behind levees, as Polidori graphically illustrates in his photographs. Bodies were also out of place with “corpses floating in dirty water” (Kelman x) (though Polidori does not photograph these, unlike Dean Sewell in Aceh in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in what I call an Orientalist pornography of death (Giblett, Landscapes 158)). Dead bodies became dirt: visible, smelly, water-logged. Colten argues that “human actions […] make an extreme event into a disaster […]. The extreme event that became a disaster was not just the result of Katrina but the product of three centuries of urbanization in a precarious site” (xix). Yet Katrina was not only the product of three centuries of urbanisation of New Orleans’ precarious and precious watershed, but also the product of three centuries of American urbanisation of the precarious and precious airshed through pollution with greenhouse gases.The watery geographical location of New Orleans, its history of drainage and levee-building, the fossil-fuel dependence of modern industrial capitalist economies, poor relief efforts and the storm combined to produce the perfect disaster of Katrina. Land, water, and air were mixed in an artificial quaking zone of elements not in their normal places, a feral quaking zone of the elements of air, earth and water that had been in the native quaking zone of swamps now ran amok in a watery wasteland (see Giblett, Landscapes especially Chapter 1). Water was on the land and in the air. In the beginning God, when created the heavens and the earth, darkness and chaos moved over the face of the waters, and the earth was without form and void in the geographical location of a native quaking zone. In the ending, when humans are recreating the heavens and the earth, darkness and chaos move over the face of the waters, and the earth is without form and void in the the geographical location and catastrophe of a feral quaking zone. Humans were thrown into this maelstrom where they quaked in fear and survived or died. Humans are now recreating the city of New Orleans in the aftermath of “Katrina.” In the beginning of the history of the city, humans created the city; from the disastrous destruction of some cities, humans are recreating the city.It is difficult to make sense of “Katrina.” Smith relates that, “as well as killing some 1500 people, the bill for the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans […] was US$200 billion, making it the most costly disaster in American history,” more than “9/11” (303; see also Flint 230). A whole series of events and images congregate around the name “Katrina,” including those of photographer Robert Polidori in his book of photographs, After the Flood, with its overtones of divine punishment for human sin as with the biblical flood (Coogan et al. Genesis, Chapters 6–7). The flood returns the earth to the beginning when God created heaven and earth, when “the earth was without form and darkness moved […] upon the face of the waters” (Coogan et al. Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 2)—God's first, and arguably best, work (Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands 142–143; Canadian Wetlands “Preface”). The single catastrophe of history and geography begins here and now in the act of creation on the first day and in dividing land from water as God also did on the second day (Coogan et al. Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 7)—God’s second, and arguably second best, work. New Orleans began in the chaos of land and water. This chaos recurs in later disasters, such as “Katrina,” which merely repeat the creation and catastrophe of the beginning in the eternal recurrence of the same. New Orleans developed by dividing land from water and is periodically flooded by the division ceasing to be returning the city to its, and the, beginning but this time inflected as a human-made “swamp,” a feral quaking zone (Giblett, Landscapes Chapter 1). Catastrophe and creativity are locked together from the beginning. The creation of the world as wetland and the separation of land and water was a catastrophic action on God's part. Its repetition in the draining or filling of wetlands is a catastrophic event for the heavens and earth, and humans, as is the unseparation of land and water in floods. What Muecke calls the rhetoric of “natural disaster” (259, 263) looms large in accounts of “Katrina.” In an escalating scale of hyperbole, “Katrina” for Brinkley was a “natural disaster” (5, 60, 77), “the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history” (62), “the biggest natural disaster in recent American history” (273), and “the worst natural disaster in modern American history” (331). Yet a hurricane in and by itself is not a disaster. It is a natural event. Perhaps all that could simply be said is that “Katrina was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in U.S. history” (Brinkley 73). Yet to be recorded in U.S. history “Katrina” had to be more than just a storm. It had also to be more than merely what Muecke calls an “oceanic disaster” (259) out to sea. It had to have made land-fall, and it had to have had human impact. It was not merely an event in the history of weather patterns in the U.S. For Brinkley “the hurricane disaster was followed by the flood disaster, which was followed by human disasters” (249). These three disasters for Brinkley add up to “the overall disaster, the sinking of New Orleans, [which] was a man-made disaster, resulting from poorly designed and managed levees and floodwalls” (426). The result was that for Brinkley “the man-made misery was worse than the storm” (597). The flood and the misery amount to what Brinkley calls “the Great Deluge [which] was a disaster that the country brought on itself” (619). The storm could also be seen as a disaster that the country brought on itself through the use of fossil fuels. The overall disaster comprising the hurricane the flood, the sinking city and its drowning or displaced inhabitants was preceded and made possible by the disasters of dredging wetlands and of global warming. Brinkley cites the work of Kerry Emanuel and concludes that “global warming makes bad hurricanes worse” (74). Draining wetlands also makes bad hurricanes worse as “miles of coastal wetlands could reduce hurricane storm surges by over three or four feet” (Brinkley 10). Miles of coastal wetlands, however, had been destroyed. Brinkley relates that “nearly one million acres of buffering wetlands in southern Louisiana disappeared between 1990 and 2005” (9). They “disappeared” as the result, not of some sort of sleight of hand or mega-conjuring trick, nor of erosion from sea-intrusion (though that contributed), but of deliberate human practice. Brinkley relates how “too many Americans saw these swamps and coastal wetlands as wastelands” (9). Wastelands needed to be redeemed into enclave estates of condos and strip developments. In a historical irony that is not lost on students of wetlands and their history, destroying wetlands can create the wasteland of flooded cities and a single catastrophe of history and geography, such as New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.In searching for a trope to explain these events Brinkley turns to the tried and true figure of the monster, usually feminised, and “Katrina” is no exception. For him, “Hurricane Katrina had been a palpable monster, an alien beast” (Brinkley xiv), “a monstrous hurricane” (72), “a monster hurricane” (115), and “the monster storm” (Brinkley 453 and Flint 230). A monster, according to The Concise Oxford Dictionary (Allen 768), is: (a) “an imaginary creature, usually large and frightening, composed of incongruous elements; or (b) a large or ugly or misshapen animal or thing.” Katrina was not imaginary, though it or she was and has been imagined in a number of ways, including as a monster. “She” was certainly large and frightening. “She” was composed of the elements of air and water. These may be incongruous elements in the normal course of events but not for a hurricane. “She” certainly caused ugliness and misshapenness to those caught in her wake of havoc, but aerial photographs show her to be a perfectly shaped hurricane, albeit with a deep and destructive throat imaginable as an orally sadistic monster. ConclusionNew Orleans, as Kelman writes in his post-Katrina preface, “has a horrible disaster history” (xii) in the sense that it has a history of horrible disasters. It also has a horrible history of the single disaster of its swampy location. Rather than “a chain of events that appears before us,” “the Angel of History” for Benjamin “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” (392). Rather than a series of disasters of the founding, drainage, disease, death, floods, hurricanes, etc. that mark the history of New Orleans, the Angel of History sees a single, catastrophic history, not just of New Orleans but preceding and post-dating it. This catastrophic history and geography began in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, darkness and chaos moved over the face of the waters, the earth was without form and void, and when God divided the land from the water, and is ending in industrial capitalism and its technologies, weather, climate, cities, floods, rivers, and wetlands intertwining and inter-relating together as entities and agents. Rather than a series of acts and sites of creativity and destruction that appear before us, the Angel of Geography sees one single process and place which keeps (re)creating order out of chaos and chaos out of order. This geography and history began at the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, and the wetland, and divided land from water, and continues when and as humans drain(ed) wetlands, create(d) cities, destroy(ed) cites, rebuilt/d cities and rehabilitate(d) wetlands. “Katrina” is a salutary instance of the cultural and natural operating together in the one single catastrophe and creativity of divine and human history and geography.ReferencesAllen, Robert. The Concise Oxford Dictionary. 8th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–1940. Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2003. 389–400.Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: William Morrow, 2006.Colten, Craig. An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006.Coogan, Michael, Marc Brettler, Carol Newsom, and Pheme Perkins, eds. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.Flint, Anthony. This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.Giblett, Rod. Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996.———. The Body of Nature and Culture. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.———. Landscapes of Culture and Nature. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.———. People and Places of Nature and Culture. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2011.———. Canadian Wetlands: Place and People. Bristol: Intellect Books, forthcoming 2014.Hirst, Paul, and Penny Woolley. “The Social Formation and Maintenance of Human Attributes.” Social Relations and Human Attributes. London: Tavistock, 1982. 23–31.Kelman, Ari. A River and its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006.Muecke, Stephen. “Hurricane Katrina and the Rhetoric of Natural Disasters.” Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia. Eds. Emily Potter, Alison Mackinnon, Stephen McKenzie and Jennifer McKay. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2005. 259–71.Polidori, Robert. After the Flood. Göttingen: Steidl, 2006.Smith, P.D. City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.Wilson, Anthony. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2006.

I have decided to launch a campaign against the skyscraper, that hideous, mediocre form of architecture…. Today we only have an empty version of it, only competing in height.— Rem Koolhaas, “Kool Enough for Beijing?”Figure 1: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard in the Air. Cher Coad, 2020.Introduction: An Anomaly within an Anomaly Construction of Beijing’s China Central Television Headquarters (henceforth CCTV Headquarters) began in 2004 and the building was officially completed in 2012. It is a project by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) headed by Rem Koolhaas (1944-), who has been called “the coolest, hippest, and most cutting-edge architect on the planet”(“Rem Koolhaas Biography”). The CCTV Headquarters is a distinctive feature of downtown Beijing and is heavily associated in the Western world with 21st-century China. It is often used as the backdrop for reports from the China correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Bill Birtles. The construction of the CCTV Headquarters, however, was very much an international enterprise. Koolhaas himself is Dutch, and the building was one of the first projects the OMA did outside of America after 9/11. As Koolhaas describes it: we had incredible emphasis on New York for five years, and America for five years, and what we decided to do after September 11 when we realized that, you know, things were going to be different in America: [was] to also orient ourselves eastwards [Koolhaas goes on to describe two projects: the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia and the CCTV Headquarters]. (Rem Koolhaas Interview) Problematically, Koolhaas claims that the building we created for CCTV could never have been conceived by the Chinese and could never have been built by Europeans. It is a hybrid by definition. It was also a partnership, not a foreign imposition…. There was a huge Chinese component from the very beginning. We tried to do a building that conveys that it has emerged from the local situation. (Fraioli 117) Our article reinterprets this reading. We suggest that the OMA’s “incredible emphasis” on America—home of the world’s first skyscraper: the Home Insurance Building built in 1885 in Chicago, Illinois—pivotally spills over into its engagement with China. The emergence of the CCTV Headquarters “from the local situation”, such as it is, is more in spite of Koolhaas’s stated “hybrid” approach than because of it, for what’s missing from his analysis of the CCTV Headquarters’ provenance is the siheyuan or classical Chinese courtyard house. We will argue that the CCTV Headquarters is an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape, to the extent that it turns the typologies of both the (vertical, American) skyscraper and the (horizontal, Chinese) siheyuan on a 90 degree angle. The important point to make here, however, is that these two anomalous elements of the building are not of the same order. While the anomalous re-configuration of the skyscraper typology is clearly part of Koolhaas’s architectural manifesto, it is against his architectural intentionality that the CCTV Headquarters sustains the typology of the siheyuan. This bespeaks the persistent and perhaps functional presence of traditional Chinese architecture and urbanism in the building. Koolhaas’s building contains both starkly evident and more secretive anomalies. Ironically then, there is a certain truth in Koolhaas’s words, beneath the critique we made of it above as an example of American-dominated, homogenising globalisation. And the significance of the CCTV Headquarters’ hybridity as both skyscraper and siheyuan can be elaborated through Daniel M. Abramson’s thesis that a consideration of unbuilt architecture has the potential to re-open architecture to its historical conditions. Roberto Schwarz argues that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Drawing on Schwarz’s work and Abramson’s, we conclude that the historical presence—as secretive anomaly—of the siheyuan in the CCTV Headquarters suggests that the building’s formal debt to the siheyuan (more so than to the American skyscraper) may continue to unsettle the “specific social relationship” of Chinese to Western society (Schwarz 53). The site of this unsettlement, we suggest, is data. The CCTV Headquarters might well be the most data-rich site in all of China—it is, after all, a monumental television station. Suggestively, this wealth of airborne data is literally enclosed within the aerial “courtyard”, with its classical Chinese form, of the CCTV Headquarters. This could hardly be irrelevant in the context of the geo-politics of globalised data. The “form of data”, to coin a phrase, radiates through all the social consequences of data flow and usage, and here the form of data is entwined with a form always already saturated with social consequence. The secretive architectural anomaly of Koolhaas’s building is thus a heterotopic space within the broader Western engagement with China, so much of which relates to flows and captures of data. The Ubiquitous Siheyuan or Classical Chinese Courtyard House According to Ying Liu and Adenrele Awotona, “the courtyard house, a residential compound with buildings surrounding a courtyard on four (or sometimes three) sides, has been representative of housing patterns for over one thousand years in China” (248). Liu and Awotona state that “courtyard house patterns could be found in many parts of China, but the most typical forms are those located in the Old City in Beijing, the capital of China for over eight hundred years” (252). In their reading, the siheyuan is a peculiarly elastic architectural typology, whose influence is present as much in the Forbidden City as in the humble family home (252). Prima facie then, it is not surprising that it has also secreted itself within the architectural form of Koolhaas’s creation. It is important to note, however, that while the “most typical forms” of the siheyuan are indeed still to be found in Beijing, the courtyard house is an increasingly uncommon sight in the Chinese capital. An article in the China Daily from 2004 refers to the “few remaining siheyuan” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). That said, all is not lost for the siheyuan. Liu and Awotona discuss how the classical form of the courtyard house has been modified to more effectively house current residents in the older parts of Beijing while protecting “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (254). “Basic design principles” (255) of the siheyuan have supported “a transition from the traditional single-household courtyard housing form to a contemporary multi-household courtyard housing form” (254). In this process, approaches of “urban renewal [involving] demolition” and “preservation, renovation and rebuilding” have been taken (255). Donia Zhang extends the work of Liu and Awotona in the elaboration of her thesis that “Chinese-Americans interested in building Chinese-style courtyard houses in America are keen to learn about their architectural heritage” (47). Zhang’s article concludes with an illustration that shows how the siheyuan may be merged with the typical American suburban dwelling (66). The final thing to emphasise about the siheyuan is what Liu and Awotona describe as its “special introverted quality” (249). The form is saturated with social consequence by virtue of its philosophical undergirding. The coincidence of philosophies of Daoism (including feng-shui) and Confucianism in the architecture and spatiality of the classical Chinese courtyard house makes it an exceedingly odd anomaly of passivity and power (250-51). The courtyard itself has a highly charged role in the management of family, social and cultural life, which, we suggest, survives its transposition into novel architectural environments. Figure 2: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking Up at “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. The CCTV Headquarters: A New Type of Skyscraper? Rem Koolhaas is not the only architect to interrogate the standard skyscraper typology. In his essay from 1999, “The Architecture of the Future”, Norman Foster argues that “the world’s increasing ecological crisis” (278) is in part a function of “unchecked urban sprawl” (279). A new type of skyscraper, he suggests, might at least ameliorate the sprawl of our cities: the Millennium Tower that we have proposed in Tokyo takes a traditional horizontal city quarter—housing, shops, restaurants, cinemas, museums, sporting facilities, green spaces and public transport networks—and turns it on its side to create a super-tall building with a multiplicity of uses … . It would create a virtually self-sufficient, fully self-sustaining community in the sky. (279) Koolhaas follows suit, arguing that “the actual point of the skyscraper—to increase worker density—has been lost. Skyscrapers are now only momentary points of high density spaced so far apart that they don’t actually increase density at all” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Foster’s solution to urban sprawl is to make the horizontal (an urban segment) vertical; Koolhaas’s is to make the vertical horizontal: “we’ve [OMA] come up with two types: a very low-rise series of buildings, or a single, condensed hyperbuilding. What we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Interestingly, the “low-rise” type mentioned here brings to mind the siheyuan—textual evidence, perhaps, that the siheyuan is always already a silent fellow traveller of the CCTV Headquarters project. The CCTV Headquarters is, even at over 200 metres tall itself, an anomaly of horizontalism amidst Beijing’s pervasive skyscraper verticality. As Paul Goldberger reports, “some Beijingers have taken to calling it Big Shorts”, which again evokes horizontality. This is its most obvious anomaly, and a somewhat melancholy reminder of “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” now mutilated by skyscrapers (Liu and Awotona 254). In the same gesture, however, with which it lays the skyscraper on its side, Koolhaas’s creation raises into the air the shape of the courtyard of a classical Chinese house. To our knowledge, no one has noticed this before, let alone written about it. It is, to be sure, a genuine courtyard shape—not merely an archway or a bridge with unoccupied space between. Pure building entirely surrounds the vertical courtyard shape formed in the air. Most images of the building provide an orientation that maximises the size of its vertical courtyard. To this extent, the (secret) courtyard shape of the building is hidden in plain sight. It is possible, however, to make the courtyard narrow to a mere slit of space, and finally to nothing, by circumnavigating the building. Certain perspectives on the building can even make it look like a more-or-less ordinary skyscraper. But, as a quick google-image search reveals, such views are rare. What seems to make the building special to people is precisely that part of it that is not building. Furthermore, anyone approaching the CCTV Headquarters with the intention of locating a courtyard typology within its form will be disappointed unless they look to its vertical plane. There is no hint of a courtyard at the base of the building. Figure 3: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 4: The CCTV Headquarters—Looking through the Floor of “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Visiting the CCTV Headquarters: A “Special Introverted Quality?” In January 2020, we visited the CCTV Headquarters, ostensibly as audience members for a recording of a science spectacular show. Towards the end of the recording, we were granted a quick tour of the building. It is rare for foreigners to gain access to the sections of the building we visited. Taking the lift about 40 floors up, we arrived at the cantilever level—known informally as “the overhang”. Glass discs in the floor allow one to walk out over nothingness, looking down on ant-like pedestrians. Looking down like this was also to peer into the vacant “courtyard” of the building—into a structure “turned or pushed inward on itself”, which is the anatomical definition of “introverted” (Oxford Languages Dictionary). Workers in the building evinced no great affection for it, and certainly nothing of our wide-eyed wonder. Somebody said, “it’s just a place to work”. One of this article’s authors, Patrick West, seemed to feel the overhang almost imperceptibly vibrating beneath him. (Still, he has also experienced this sensation in conventional skyscrapers.) We were told the rumour that the building has started to tilt over dangerously. Being high in the air, but also high on the air, with nothing but air beneath us, felt edgy—somehow special—our own little world. Koolhaas promotes the CCTV Headquarters as (in paraphrase) “its own city, its own community” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). This resonated with us on our visit. Conventional skyscrapers fracture any sense of community through their segregated floor-upon-floor verticality; there is never enough room for a little patch of horizontal urbanism to unroll. Within “the overhang”, the CCTV Headquarters felt unlike a standard skyscraper, as if we were in an urban space magically levitated from the streets below. Sure, we had been told by one of the building’s inhabitants that it was “just a place to work”—but compared to the bleak sterility of most skyscraper work places, it wasn’t that sterile. The phrase Liu and Awotona use of the siheyuan comes to mind here, as we recall our experience; somehow, we had been inside a different type of building, one with its own “special introverted quality” (249). Special, that is, in the sense of containing just so much of horizontal urbanism as allows the building to retain its introverted quality as “its own city” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). Figure 5: The CCTV Headquarters—View from “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020.Figure 6: The CCTV Headquarters—Inside “The Overhang”. Cher Coad, 2020. Unbuilt Architecture: The Visionary and the Contingent Within the present that it constitutes, built architecture is surrounded by unbuilt architecture at two interfaces: where the past ends; where the future begins. The soupy mix of urbanism continually spawns myriad architectural possibilities, and any given skyscraper is haunted by all the skyscrapers it might have been. History and the past hang heavily from them. Meanwhile, architectural programme or ambition—such as it is—pulls in the other direction: towards an idealised (if not impossible to practically realise) future. Along these lines, Koolhaas and the OMA are plainly a future-directed, as well as self-aware, architectural unit: at OMA we try to build in the greatest possible tolerance and the least amount of rigidity in terms of embodying one particular moment. We want our buildings to evolve. A building has at least two lives—the one imagined by its maker and the life it lives afterward—and they are never the same. (Fraioli 115) Koolhaas makes the same point even more starkly with regard to the CCTV Headquarters project through his use of the word “prototype”: “what we’re doing with CCTV is a prototype of the hyperbuilding” (“Kool Enough for Beijing?”). At the same time, however, as the presence of the siheyuan within the architecture of the CCTV Headquarters shows, the work of the OMA cannot escape from the superabundance of history, within which, as Roberto Schwarz claims, “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). Supporting our contentions here, Daniel M. Abramson notes that unbuilt architecture implies two sub-categories … the visionary unbuilt, and the contingent … . Visionary schemes invite a forward glance, down one true, vanguard path to a reformed society and discipline. The contingent unbuilts, conversely, invite a backward glance, along multiple routes history might have gone, each with its own likelihood and validity; no privileged truths. (Abramson)Introducing Abramson’s theory to the example of the CCTV Headquarters, the “visionary unbuilt” lines up with Koolhaas’ thesis that the building is a future-directed “prototype”. while the clearest candidate for the “contingent unbuilt”, we suggest, is the siheyuan. Why? Firstly, the siheyuan is hidden in plain sight, within the framing architecture of the CCTV Headquarters; secondly, it is ubiquitous in Beijing urbanism—little wonder then that it turns up, unannounced, in this Beijing building; thirdly, and related to the second point, the two buildings share a “special introverted quality” (Liu and Awotona 249). “The contingent”, in this case, is the anomaly nestled within the much more blatant “visionary” (or futuristic) anomaly—the hyperbuilding to come—of the Beijing-embedded CCTV Headquarters. Koolhaas’s building’s most fascinating anomaly relates, not to any forecast of the future, but to the subtle persistence of the past—its muted quotation of the ancient siheyuan form. Our article is, in part, a response to Abramson’s invitation to “pursue … the consequences of the unbuilt … [and thus] to open architectural history more fully to history”. We have supplemented Abramson’s idea with Schwarz’s suggestion that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53). The anomaly of the siheyuan—alongside that of the hyperbuilding—within the CCTV headquarters, opens the building up (paraphrasing Abramson) to a fuller analysis of its historical positioning within Western and Eastern flows of globalisation (or better, as we are about to suggest, of glocalisation). In parallel, its form (paraphrasing Schwarz) abstracts and re-presents this history’s specific social relationships. Figure 7: The CCTV Headquarters—A Courtyard of Data. Cher Coad, 2020.Conclusion: A Courtyard of Data and Tensions of Glocalisation Koolhaas proposes that the CCTV Headquarters was “a partnership, not a foreign imposition” and that the building “emerged from the local situation” (Fraioli 117). To us, this smacks of Pollyanna globalisation. The CCTV Headquarters is, we suggest, more accurately read as an imposition of the American skyscraper typology, albeit in anomalous form. (One might even argue that the building’s horizontal deviation from the vertical norm reinforces that norm.) Still, amidst a thicket of conventionally vertical skyscrapers, the building’s horizontalism does have the anomalous effect of recalling “the horizontal planning feature of traditional Beijing” (Liu and Awotona 254). Buried within its horizontalism, however, lies a more secretive anomaly in the form of a vertical siheyuan. This anomaly, we contend, motivates a terminological shift from “globalisation” to “glocalisation”, for the latter term better captures the notion of a lack of reconciliation between the “global” and the “local” in the building. Koolhaas’s visionary architectural programme explicitly advances anomaly. The CCTV Headquarters radically reworks the skyscraper typology as the prototype of a hyperbuilding defined by horizontalism. Certainly, such horizontalism recalls the horizontal plane of pre-skyscraper Beijing and, if faintly, that plane’s ubiquitous feature: the classical courtyard house. Simultaneously, however, the siheyuan has a direct if secretive presence within the morphology of the CCTV Headquarters, even as any suggestion of a vertical courtyard is strikingly absent from Koolhaas’s vanguard manifesto. To this extent, the hyperbuilding fits within Abramson’s category of “the visionary unbuilt”, while the siheyuan aligns with Abramson’s “contingent unbuilt” descriptor. The latter is the “might have been” that, largely under the pressure of its ubiquity as Beijing vernacular architecture, “very nearly is”. Drawing on Schwarz’s idea that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships”, we propose that the siheyuan, as anomalous form of the CCTV Headquarters, is a heterotopic space within the hybrid global harmony (to paraphrase Koolhaas) purportedly represented by the building (53). In this space thus formed collides the built-up historical and philosophical social intensity of the classical Chinese courtyard house and the intensities of data flows and captures that help constitute the predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist “social relationship” of China and the Western world—the world of the skyscraper (Schwarz). Within the siheyuan of the CCTV Headquarters, globalised data is literally enveloped by Daoism and Confucianism; it is saturated with the social consequence of local place. The term “glocalisation” is, we suggest, to be preferred here to “globalisation”, because of how it better reflects such vernacular interruptions to the hegemony of globalised space. Forms delineate social relationships, and data, which both forms and is formed by social relationships, may be formed by architecture as much as anything else within social space. Attention to the unbuilt architectural forms (vanguard and contingent) contained within the CCTV Headquarters reveals layers of anomaly that might, ultimately, point to another form of architecture entirely, in which glocal tensions are not only recognised, but resolved. Here, Abramson’s historical project intersects, in the final analysis, with a worldwide politics. Figure 8: The CCTV Headquarters—A Sound Stage in Action. Cher Coad, 2020. References Abramson, Daniel M. “Stakes of the Unbuilt.” Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. 20 July 2020. <http://we-aggregate.org/piece/stakes-of-the-unbuilt>.Foster, N. “The Architecture of the Future.” The Architecture Reader: Essential Writings from Vitruvius to the Present. Ed. A. Krista Sykes. New York: George Braziller, 2007: 276-79. Fraioli, Paul. “The Invention and Reinvention of the City: An Interview with Rem Koolhaas.” Journal of International Affairs 65.2 (Spring/Summer 2012): 113-19. Goldberger, Paul. “Forbidden Cities: Beijing’s Great New Architecture Is a Mixed Blessing for the City.” The New Yorker—The Sky Line. 23 June 2008. <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/30/forbidden-cities>.“Kool Enough for Beijing?” China Daily. 2 March 2004. <https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/02/content_310800.htm>. Liu, Ying, and Adenrele Awotona. “The Traditional Courtyard House in China: Its Formation and Transition.” Evolving Environmental Ideals—Changing Way of Life, Values and Design Practices: IAPS 14 Conference Proceedings. IAPS. Stockholm, Sweden: Royal Institute of Technology, 1996: 248-60. <https://iaps.architexturez.net/system/files/pdf/1202bm1029.content.pdf>.Oxford Languages Dictionary. “Rem Koolhaas Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. 20 July 2020. <https://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ge-La/Koolhaas-Rem.html>. “Rem Koolhaas Interview.” Manufacturing Intellect. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 2003. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW187PwSjY0>.Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992. Zhang, Donia. “Classical Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Architecture as Cultural Artifact.” Space and Communication 1.1 (Dec. 2015): 47-68.