Albert Kahn

Though he has been marginalized in most mainstream accounts of modern architecture, Albert Kahn (b. 1869–d. 1942) is increasingly considered one of the most important and consequential US architects of the 20th century. Kahn is known primarily for the technically innovative and rigorously functional factory buildings that his still-extant firm Albert Kahn Associates, Inc. (founded 1903) designed for automotive manufacturers, including the Ford Motor Company, but his firm was also responsible for hundreds of eclectically styled buildings for other purposes in Detroit, Michigan. Research and writing regarding Albert Kahn often requires considerable effort to disambiguation. Most importantly, Albert Kahn the man is far from a synecdoche for the firm he founded, Albert Kahn Associates, Inc., which employed upward of several hundred people at its height and is still in operation under the simplified Kahn moniker today. Some mid-20th century historians and critics substituted the inaccurate and often derogatory moniker “Albert Kahn Inc.” as name for the firm to suggest its alienated and impersonal nature. Albert Kahn’s siblings are also worthy of attention in their own right. Frequently mentioned in the extant literature are brothers Julius (b. 1874–d. 1942) who was a trained engineer, inventor and co-founder of the highly successful Trussed Concrete Steel Company; Moritz (b. 1880–d. 1939), who was also an executive of the Kahn firm pivotal in its operations in the USSR between 1929 and 1932, and occasionally Louis (b. 1885–d. 1945), who was a manager and executive in the Kahn firm. Views of Albert Kahn have served as a barometer for the intellectual climate in architecture culture since the early 20th century, indexing the relative importance of aesthetics, ethics, and technics. Studies of Kahn and his firm have, until recently, primarily focused on their contributions to industrial architecture and the influence of their early factory buildings on architecture culture at large. These studies often describe the give-and-take between assembly lines and the streamlined, pragmatic design of the buildings that encompassed them. An upsurge of recent attention to Kahn’s work has been oriented away from issues of design toward larger histories. Some scholars have addressed the shift toward large, integrated offices within the profession, for which Albert Kahn Associates was a groundbreaking exemplar. Others have addressed the ways Kahn served the growth of global enterprise, revealing that his marginalization from architectural history has effaced the willful complicity of US architects in compounding capitalist power and solidifying its ideology. These topics remain rich veins for future researchers.

Widmo Chopina krąży po Warszawie

Pejzaż myśli. Warszawa Chopina i początek polskiej nowoczesności [A landscape of thoughts: Chopin’s Warsaw and the beginning of Polish modernity] by Michał Kuziak is a book combining the values of a scholarly work and a work whose main task is to popularise knowledge both about Frédéric Chopin himself and about the world that surrounded him and that shaped him. The dissertation is not only the context for the composer’s life; it is also part of a broader stream of research on the beginnings of Polish modernity. The book is therefore about Warsaw understood not only as the place where young Frédéric grew up, but also as the area where the foundations of Polish modernity were laid. Chopin functioned in a kind of intellectual melting pot within which there was a conflict between tradition and modernity, between progress and conservatism. The author precisely delineates the chronological framework within which he moves. These are the years 1810–1830, that is, the first 20 years of the composer’s life. However, the book does not only focus on the person of Chopin, so it is not “Chopin-centric.” The work consists of three parts, each of them marked with a significant title: 1. “City and people”; 2. “Institutions and people”; 3. “Thoughts and people.” This arrangement is a good example of the author’s main idea: to show Chopin among people, and also people within the city, municipal institutions and the thoughts that developed there. For the author of the book, Warsaw was a crucible and a cosmos of thoughts: on the one hand, there is a constant offensive of scientifi c and technical thought related to the Enlightenment tradition, and on the other, the birth of the world of spirit and religion. Polish modernity is an eclectic mixture in which there are still remnants of the noble world, but the foundations of the bourgeois world are also being laid. Kuziak, drawing an image of Warsaw at that time, emphasises the importance of key cultural institutions, such as literary salons and cafés. For Chopin, cafés, where he met with representatives of the contemporary world of literature and poetry, were of particular importance. Warsaw’s intellectual climate, inspired by the French Enlightenment, was giving way more and more to the influences of German culture associated with Romanticism. Kuziak writes that the modernity of the Romantic type was shaped by German culture. He regards the considerations of Kazimierz Brodziński and Maurycy Mochnacki as the two largest projects of modern Polish identity. Importantly, both of these authors were closely associated with the Polish musical culture which the young Chopin absorbed. The author of the book makes a reservation that it is difficult to conclusively confi rm what influence the institutional and intellectual shape of Warsaw at that time had on Chopin. He states with certainty that Chopin’s trips outside the city, and thus getting to know Masovian folklore, had a decisive impact on his imagination. The book does not, however, determine how the then Warsaw shaped the composer’s later life. The author brilliantly reconstructed the background on which Chopin’s shadow moved, but he chose not to answer the most important question: did the city, people, institutions and intellectual climate ultimately form the composer’s modern world view? This question remains open.

Introduction

Like the earlier issue of the Yearbook, this one also consists of two major parts. The first is devoted to the cultural and intellectual climate of the courts of queens in medieval and modern Europe. At the beginning of the 2000s, comments made in Polish historiography that we know little about the queens and their role in the state, or about their environment, and that the structures of the courts of Polish duchesses and queens remain outside the mainstream of research, were by all means correct. Over the past twenty years, however, the subject of the courts of Polish queens in the Middle Ages and in the modern era has gained a group of scholars who have increasingly went beyond structural and interpersonal studies, and in Polish studies, the current of queenship, which is part of this problem and which has enjoyed a noticeable popularity in Western historiographies, is more and more visible.

AL-FARABI’S PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC

Scientists propose to understand the effect of music on the human psyche, knowledge about the soul, science, metaphysics, and spheres. At the center of all these discussions, we assume researchers are not focusing on how music triggers emotions. In this century we live in, most writers agree that this is the most crucial issue. Today’s researchers want to know why music creates strong emotional reactions in people with scientific explanations. Our study aims to find answers to today’s questions between the 9th and 10th centuries, indicated as the golden age of Islamic culture. We aimed to shed light on the answers to the questions of today’s researchers about the effect of music on the human soul. This article focuses on the second teacher’s approach to cosmology and how the various sciences contribute to the study of the heavens. After a survey of the sources available to Al Farabi, which helps to contextualise his work in light of the Greek legacy and the Arabic intellectual climate of his day, authors define his conception of the scientific method and to show the relation between scientific practice and theory. With a multidisciplinary approach to the history of philosophy and astronomy, Al Farabi’s philosophy of music contributes to physics, metaphysics and astronomy. As a result, our article contains the formulation of innovative, philosophical musical ideas. It is an effort that emerged in the formulation of Al Farabi’s Ptolemaic astronomy. The guiding subject of our research provided a holistic approach to the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic theories that complement each other. Adopting this perspective allows for a broader study of music within a particular culture or situation. The article examines ‘Kitab Al Musiqa’ research in the light of a definition of music that embraces the diversity of music using universal methods. Music is a significant and integral dimension of human improvement.

Creating the New System

This chapter explores whether a new labor system could ever become law and overcome the massive political hurdles standing in the way. The path to victory is quite narrow. There needs to be sufficient grassroots activism to push labor issues to the top of the agenda, a strong majority of politicians willing to vote for pro-union policy, champions to drive the policy forward, and a favorable intellectual climate. As difficult as these are to achieve, they are possible if favorable trends continue and rise in intensity. The public must increasingly and more forcefully demand change, and the political and intellectual climate must continue shifting in favor of labor modernization. The chapter concludes by echoing the theme of the book — that a new labor system with broad-based bargaining and encouragement for union membership would help address the fundamental economic and political challenges that the United States faces. The more people recognize this, the better the chances for creating a new labor system.

Vital aspirations for geography in an era of negativity: Valuing life differently with Deleuze

Human geography has seen a vitalist renaissance over the past decade; however, geography’s concerns are mounting in relation to vitalism’s critical efficacy and political relevance. This article pushes back against these concerns. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, we engage with vitalism as a critical pause and consequently as a vital aspiration in an intellectual climate that is growing increasingly enamoured of negativity as the barometer of serious thinking. In sum, we show how Deleuze’s ‘non-organic vitalism’ promotes a wilder sense of thinking and a more affirmative politics, without acquiescing to the problems of the present.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon galvanized the Scottish literary scene in 1932 with Sunset Song, the first novel of the epic trilogy A Scots Quair, that drew vividly upon his deprived upbringing on a small croft in Aberdeenshire to capture the zeitgeist of the early twentieth century. Yet his literary legacy extends significantly beyond his breakout book. The seventeen volumes that he amassed in his short life, under his own name of James Leslie Mitchell as well as his Scots pseudonym, demonstrate his versatility, as historian, essayist, biographer and fiction writer. His corpus pays testimony to his core principles, rooted in his rural upbringing: his restless humanitarianism and his deep veneration for the natural world. Set against an informed conspectus of Mitchell’s life and times and incorporating substantive new source material, this study provides a comprehensive and searching analysis of the canon of a combative writer whose fame in recent years – as cultural nationalist, left-wing libertarian, proto-feminist, neo-romantic visionary and trailblazing modernist – has carried far beyond his native land. In tune with the intellectual climate of the inter-war years, Gibbon emerges as a passionate advocate of revolutionary political activism; in addition, as a profound believer in the overarching primacy of nature, he is represented as a supreme practitioner in the field of ecofiction. Coupled with his modernist experimentation with language and narrative, this firmly establishes him amongst the foremost fiction writers of the twentieth century – uniquely, a figure whose achievement has consistently won both critical and popular acclaim.

Zuzanna Ginczanka: krytyka, poezja, życie. O tym, jak otwierają się znaki

The article is an attempt to grasp a feature of the literary and cultural phenomenon of Zuzanna Ginczanka, a Ukrainian-born Polish poetess of the Jewish origin. It refers to 1) biographical elements, 2) their mediation in chosen critical works, as well as 3) the samples of Ginczanka’s literary output. The key concept for my investigations is openness (understood mainly as indeterminacy of meaning), which I associate with the intellectual climate of postmodernism, to trace, however, the modalities and variations of openness in Ginczanka’s life, criticism and poetry.