Minimal Monitoring of Improvements in Energy Performance after Envelope Renovation in Subsidized Single Family Housing in Madrid

This study quantified the improvement in energy efficiency following passive renovation of the thermal envelope in highly inefficient residential complexes on the outskirts of the city of Madrid. A case study was conducted of a single-family terrace housing, representative of the smallest size subsidized dwellings built in Spain for workers in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Two units of similar characteristics, one in its original state and the other renovated, were analyzed in detail against their urban setting with an experimental method proposed hereunder for simplified, minimal monitoring. The dwellings were compared on the grounds of indoor environment quality parameters recorded over a period covering both winter and summer months. That information was supplemented with an analysis of the energy consumption metered. The result was a low-cost, reasonably accurate measure of the improvements gained in the renovated unit. The monitoring output data were entered in a theoretical energy efficiency model for the entire neighborhood to obtain an estimate of the potential for energy savings if the entire urban complex were renovated.

Popularyzatorskie audycje radiowe i telewizyjne Alodii Kaweckiej-Gryczowej, czyli o tym jak Wietor pod Krakowem w błocie utknął

In accord with her concept of constructing ‘workshops for enlightening and educating the society’ Professor Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa was very keen on popularizing book history. Little wonder then that she let no opportunity pass to talk on the radio or the television about old prints, the National Library, or about books in general. The bibliography of her works prepared by A. M. Wolińska includes among other eight such programmes for the years 1974–1985, although Wolińska notices that, there must have been more. This statement found substantiation in the ‘Grycz papers’ bequeathed to the National Library – the folder Akc. 17978 holds typescripts of eleven radio and television programmes broadcast between 1950 and 1968, and two other with no dating. Unfortunately, the data provided by these papers does not allow a for more detailed historical description of these programmes, their dates of emission, length and producers. Neither can one find in this folder the screen-plays of the programmes listed by A. M. Wolińska, with the sole exception of the radio broadcast devoted to the printer Wietor, emitted in 1950. All the other materials come from the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties, which explains why they are not present in the Archives of the Polish Radio and Television – being either never recorded, or the tapes had been destroyed. The aforementioned folder also contains a number of catalogue cards on which one finds titles and shelf-marks of books, which were utilized by Gryczowa in her cooperation with the radio and television, although it is difficult to ascertain that all these books were gathered for programmes, in which Professor Gryczowa took part personally.

The World Upside-Down: The Carnivalesque Studio in Entre visillos

Entre visillos by Carmen Martín Gaite follows the lives of several middle-class young women living in Francoist Spain during the nineteen-fifties, portraying the restrictive and conservative confines of both traditional Spanish culture and fascist dictatorship in which these women lived. This essay, however, examines how Martín Gaite uses place and setting to define the characters’ behavior and their adherence to norms under Francisco Franco’s authoritarian, reactionary rule. Specifically, the essay analyzes the spatial conditions for liminal anomie, the temporal dissolution and subversion of norms, in the novel. Through an approximation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesqueand Michel de Certeau’s theory of everyday resistance, I argue that the characters employ tactics of resistance (de Certeau) to establish the bohemian party at the top-floor studio apartment of Yoni, the eccentric artist, as a carnivalesque that acts as a safe haven for anomie, the expression of hidden transcripts (James Scott) that constitute resistance against hegemonic Spanish society, and the reimagination of Spanish identity during the epoch. By studying how the characters stray from norms through their interpersonal relations, absurd values, and paradoxical and parodical behavior, it becomes clear that the studio is a unique, free space for contesting conventions of modesty and patriarchy under the Spanish dictatorship. The inclusion in the novel of such themes as promiscuity, infidelity, and immodest behavior further reveals that Entre visillositself is a carnivalesque work that reimagines the values, norms, and conscience of Spanish society.

Leela Mulherkar and the teaching of developmental biology

The formal teaching of developmental biology in India began in the late nineteen-fifties at the Department of Zoology of the University of Poona. This was due to the efforts of Leela Mulherkar, who on her return from C.H. Waddington’s laboratory in Edinburgh, took up the teaching of embryology at the Master’s level. Mulherkar began using locally available material to teach how animals develop. They included the embryos of chicken, frog, garden lizard and molluscs, as well as organisms such as hydra and sponges. Her teaching was supported by an active research laboratory that used all these systems to address a variety of questions in embryology and teratology. She used chick embryo explants cultured in vitro extensively in her work. Teaching and research in embryology at the master’s and doctoral levels at Poona University subsequently led, in 1977, to the establishment of the Indian Society of Developmental Biologists (InSDB), which is among the most active scientific societies in India.

Jorge Oteiza y Mariano Garrigues en el INIA (1951-57): un cruce de dos modernidades

The fruitful decade of the nineteen-fifties, although a widely studied period, harbours unexpected eventualities, such as the confluence of a resolutely experimental sculptor and an architect of a more possibilistic nature. The circumstances surrounding the encounter and revelation of this joint work, very rarely mentioned in the corresponding literature, can be seen as an event that contributes to verifying, once again, the multi-faceted soul of the modern movement in Spain, whose fruitfulness was a result of its inherent hybridity, strengthened by the challenge of creating any classification. In this case, it is concluded that Oteiza’s piece, the result of his investigation into the spatial implications of the wall, is juxtaposed against the building by Garrigues without achieving a real dialogue with the incipient modernism in the architecture of the institute.

‘The Russian Revolution has not yet taken place’: British views of the Soviet economy between the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-seventies

This article examines British officials' and ministers' attitudes towards the Soviet Union's economy in the post-Second World War era. In the nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, public and some expert commentary posited Soviet economic ‘success’ based on the country's increasingly rapid growth rate, its potential for consumerization, the promise of economic reform, and the Soviet state's emphasis on education, science and the application of computer technology. New evidence from British official archives, presented here, makes clear that Westminster and Whitehall were never persuaded of this view, and always believed that political meddling and microeconomic inefficiencies would ultimately restrain and undermine Soviet growth.

Zaobchádzanie s obsahom o západnom plánovaní v československých architektonických časopisoch 1945–1970

Architectural journals were, for their readers, architects and planners in the former Czechoslovakia, one of the few means of gaining information about Western planning in the post-war period. Despite the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovak planners were significantly influenced by contemporary discussions in the West. Analysis of the content of five major architectural journals from the period 1945–1970 proves that Czechoslovak urban planning discourse was not fully separated from the Western world, but was largely developed in contact with the West. The architectural magazines presented Western content in different genres. In the first years after World War II, the magazines used comprehensive studies based on Western projects and materials obtained mainly from organized excursions abroad. Later, with the introduction of the communist regime, the magazines included social critique, critique of cosmopolitanism, and brief articles based on selections from the foreign press. In the early nineteen-fifties, Soviet ideologybased parodies of Western planning appeared. After the rejection of socialist realism in the mid-fifties, the magazines included regular sections from the Western press and even reportage from abroad.