divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/91276?ns=guardianpageName=Art+and+design%3A+How+I+learnt+to+love+the+streets+in+the+skych=Art+and+designc3=The+Observerc4=Architecture%2CCulture+section%2CObserverc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CArchitecturec6=Rachel+Cookec7=2008_11_23c8=1122322c9=articlec10=GUc11=Art+and+designc12=Architecturec13=c14=h2=GU%2FArt+and+design%2FArchitecture" width="1" height="1" //divpSome children are brought up to love cats and hate dogs, others to adore Manchester United and despise Liverpool. I was brought up to revere Victorian architecture and to abhor modern buildings. Modern buildings, whatever their vintage, whatever their supposed virtues, were rubbish and that was that. In the 1980s, an 'executive' estate was built on the field opposite our Sheffield home. For my parents, midway through restoring their black-leaded fireplaces, the arrival of these buildings involved a certain amount of trauma, an anxiety that transmitted itself to me. /ppOur terrace was built of local sandstone and, darkened by age and industry, its exterior always reminded me of burnt toast. These houses, though, were built of brick so bright it made my eyes ache and they had gleaming tarmac drives which looked, even in dry weather, like licks of liquorice. At night, I lay in bed and indulged in violent fantasies in which I went Awol with a wrecking ball./ppIn Sheffield, haters of modern architecture had a perfect focus for their loathing in the form of Park Hill, the council estate that is now the biggest listed building in Britain. As a teenager, I hated Park Hill even more than I loathed Mrs Thatcher, for the simple reason that it made people think badly of my city. It wasn't just that no one liked so-called Brutalism. By the mid-1980s, the flats, then nearly 30 years old, were in a sorry state: dilapidated, and reputedly crammed with the council's most difficult tenants. Yet no visitor could escape them. The estate sits high on a cliff, overlooking the railway station, dominating the landscape like some great prison (a friend of a friend was once told by a taxi driver that Park Hill had been built, not in the late 1950s, but in the 1930s and that had Hitler invaded Britain, it would have been the site of his HQ). /ppWhen I went to university and told people where I was from, they would wrinkle their noses and say: 'Oh, I went through there once on the train...' and you just knew that they were picturing Park Hill. It was embarrassing. Why couldn't the council knock the thing down and start again? /ppStrange, then, that all these years later Park Hill is not only one of the buildings that I like most in the world, but the cause of an unexpected passion on my part for 20th-century buildings in general and 1960s buildings in particular (though I still hate executive estates and always will). This is not to say that I love every bit of concrete I see. The more I learn, the more I realise that postwar architecture is like any other kind of architecture: some is good, some bad. /ppRecently, I visited Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London, a scheme with which Park Hill is often compared, and a recent Brutalist cause celebre (in July, to much gnashing of teeth from architecture nerds, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, advised by English Heritage, ruled that the estate, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, would not be listed, though the Twentieth Century Society has since been successful in its request for a legal review of this decision). /ppThanks to my new fondness for grey slabs, I expected, if not to love it, then to want to save it; this is the only housing scheme that the radical Smithsons ever managed to get built. But the DCMS was right. Robin Hood Gardens is neither generous, nor well-built, and its site has changed beyond all recognition in the last 30 years, its old dockyard views gone, its 'gardens' polluted by the relentless grind of traffic into the Blackwall Tunnel. It is beyond saving, as its fans would find out if they ran a competition among developers for its renovation (there isn't a company in the land that would want that gig)./ppBut Park Hill is not Robin Hood Gardens. Once a great and innovative building, it one day will be again. In the last year, Sheffield City Council's ambitious plan to give the estate a second life as a hip home for urban professionals has at last got under way: tenants have moved out and Urban Splash, the development company, has moved in. When I first heard about this project, I assumed that these residents, worn down by living in a building so down at heel, would be glad to escape, that they'd say to the incoming yuppies: 'You're welcome to it' and score themselves a nice new house. /ppI was wrong. More than 200 have put down their names for the share of Park Hill that will eventually be owned by Manchester Methodist Housing Association (determined that the site be socially mixed, the council has decreed that a third of the 900 new flats will be 'affordable' and two-thirds of those will be for social rent). Some are living elsewhere and hope to return. A hard core, however, remains on site even as the dust rises around them. This lot love Park Hill and don't like the idea of living anywhere else./ppCut to last April, when all this started. Until now, I've never been inside Park Hill. Once I'm standing in the middle of it, though, two things strike me. The first is the sense of drama that builds as you walk through its courtyards, which get grander the higher the flats grow (built on a hill, the lowest tower sits on the site's highest point and vice versa); their embrace makes me think not of A Clockwork Orange but of the Colosseum in Rome. The second is the fact that Park Hill, unlike Robin Hood Gardens and its listed neighbour, Ernouml; Goldfinger's Balfron Tower, is not built of concrete. Its frame is concrete but its curtain walls are made of red, orange and yellow brick. Thanks to the damage wrought by heavy pollution, this is not something you can tell from the street. /ppBeside me, in the whipping cold, Grenville Squires, a caretaker who has worked here for 26 years - until recently, he lived here, too - is hopping with excitement. He loves tourists. 'The way it all fits together,' he says. 'It's like a jigsaw puzzle. I look at it as a feat of engineering. It was so clever. It had a district heating system - the only place with one like it was in Norway, where they'd capped a geyser - and a communal waste disposal system [this survived until the advent of disposable nappies]. When the new developers did a concrete survey, they found that it is not yet a third of the way through its life.' /ppWe get in Grenville's electric cart, and he drives me along Park Hill's interconnected decks to prove that the now much derided 'streets in the sky' really were wide enough to take a milk float. When we get to a suitable vantage point, he attempts to describe the estate as it was. 'There were four pubs, a supermarket, a hardware shop, a butcher's, a ladies' shoe shop, a chip shop. It was like a medieval village; you didn't have to leave.'/ppSo he doesn't believe that it was Park Hill's architects, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, who are to blame for what eventually became of the estate? That their design was too brutal, too idealistic, too rigidly controlling? /pp'No, it was the council's fault. They gave anyone who wanted one a flat and they didn't work hard enough at maintenance. She's lovely [the building]. She's my mistress, the only lady who's fetched me from the marital bed at two in the morning and made demands. She has come on hard times, but all she's got to do is wash her face and put on a new dress and she will be fine.'/ppAt the Park Hill social club, I meet the hard core who remain in residence; they are of the same opinion. Brenda Hague was 22 when she moved into Park Hill on 7 December 1959. Was she full of foreboding as she took possession of her neat new flat with its covetable kitchen, a reconstruction of which I have just seen in Sheffield's Weston Park Museum? Not at all. 'It was luxury,' she says. 'Me, my husband and our baby were living in a back-to-back. My parents were there, too, and my brother. We had no bathroom, just a tin bath on the back of the door. So when we got here it was marvellous. Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It's lovely, especially at night, when it's all lit up.'/ppIn those days, Park Hill was a quiet place, most of its tenants young families. But even when it began to be run down, in the 1980s, her fondness endured. 'It always felt safe to me. They say it looks horrible. Maybe it does from the outside. It's what's inside that counts. My son lives in Harrogate now and he has nothing but fond memories.'/ppHow does she feel about the refurbishment? Pleased, so long as she can remain where she's always been. I ask her friend Edith Bradbury, another resident of almost half a century, if it's hard to imagine a new Park Hill, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of its previous incarnation. 'It is. But it was hard to imagine it when it first went up. All the little streets this replaced. Who'd have thought it?'/pp'Will it work? Will it be a success?' 'Yes. I think it is going to be lovely.'/ppPark Hill tells the story of a century. The streets it replaced were home to some of the worst slums in Europe, people living 400 to the acre in houses so tightly packed they barely saw the sun, their only access to water a standpipe in the yard. But they had work. The valley that Park Hill lords it over was home to steel mills, mines and the workshops of the Little Mesters, the craftsmen who made the finest cutlery in the world. Park Hill's fortunes faded as this industry evaporated into thin air; between 1979 and 1989, 53,000 jobs were lost in a city of 200,000. /ppWhat interests me, though, is what the estate tells us about our relationship with modern buildings. These days, a single structure can come to represent a world view, standing proxy for our aesthetics and our politics. I used to hate it and now I like it. Perhaps you think this tells you a lot about me, but it doesn't really. Or it shouldn't. Park Hill is only one building. This is why we should treat with caution the arguments of commentators like Simon Jenkins, the new chairman of the National Trust, who deride all Brutalist buildings, the 'ideologues' who created them and the intellectuals and theorists who praise them while choosing to live in Georgian terraces. /ppBrenda Hague is no theorist, nor is Ivor Smith an ideologue. 'When Reyner Banham [the architecture critic] called us Brutalists, we didn't know what it meant,' says Smith (his partner Jack Lynn is dead). 'We didn't think we were Brutalists. We thought we were quite nice guys.'/ppWhen work began on Park Hill in 1957, he and Lynn were young, newly qualified, full of youthful enthusiasm and inspired by the optimism abroad in postwar Britain, however austere. 'The Uniteacute; [by le Corbusier, in Marseille] had just been built and it was exciting. But it wasn't an infatuation. We'd also made drawings of John Wood's crescents in Bath.'/ppReturning to Park Hill after 35 years, he thought it looked 'marvellous' from the town. Was there anything he would have done differently? 'The decks. A street has windows at street level. But at Park Hill, conditioned by best value for money, we couldn't have windows on to the pavements.' Does he like Urban Splash's ideas? 'Yes, though if anything I think they could be more daring.'/ppWhat of those ideas? The company has produced a flash brochure to showcase its pound;130m refurbishment of Park Hill and it makes for cheering, if occasionally comic, reading. To the naysayers, it points out that the density of the site - 192 people per acre - is well in excess of what the government considers to be a sustainable community and that the flats' original plans are more generous than the boxes favoured by modern developers. So, Park Hill is a 'bruiser'. /ppThe company will give it 'romance': oak trees, allotments, a wildflower meadow, crown green bowls, a dance studio, a high street ('a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker'). The marketeers write of wanting to build a 'yellow brick road' leading to a city sweet shop, Granelli's Spice ('spice' is a Sheffield word for sweets and Bertie Bassett one of its most famous sons). Cutest of all, the company will retain the graffiti that adorns Park Hill 13 storeys up and which once had a starring role in an Arctic Monkeys video: 'I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME'. /ppBut none of this would be happening at all were it not for the building itself. English Heritage's controversial decision to confer Grade II* listed status on Park Hill in 1998, for its contribution to British Modernism, now seems prescient and wise. It surely would have been demolished otherwise and lots of identical, red-brick boxes stuck in its place. Of course, refurbishments of modernist buildings are extremely challenging and not all successful. In Islington, residents of Lubetkin's Spa Green Estate are taking legal action over the recent refurbishment of their homes, claiming the work was 'poor at best, and damaging at worst'. /ppBut for the time being, the sense of hope and expectation at Park Hill is palpable. After my visit, I catch the bus home to our toasty old terrace and, over supper, I ask my mother, ever so politely, if she has thought about where she will live in her retirement./ph2Good, bad, ugly? Modernist landmarks/h2pstrongRoyal College of Physicians, Regent's Park, London, by Denys Lasdun (1964)/strongbr /Most people know Lasdun for the Royal National Theatre, but this is miles better; its elegant sensibility seems to owe more to Frank Lloyd Wright thanbr /le Corbusier./ppstrongHunstanton Secondary School, Norfolk, by Alison and Peter Smithson (1949-1954)/strongbr /The building that made them famous: a steel frame with brick and glass panels, and a water tank high on a tower, it's a small-scale homage to Mies van der Rohe./ppstrong2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London, by Ernouml; Goldfinger (1938)/strongbr /Goldfinger is best known for his immense Brutalist tower blocks, Trellick Tower in North Kensington, and Balfron Tower in Poplar. Willow Road, his home, is more gentle and notable for its clever use of space and a spiral staircase designed by Ove Arup./ppstrongTrinity Square car park, Gateshead, by Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon (1969)/strongbr /Also known as the Get Carter car park, after the 1971 film in which it appears. See it now: its demolition is imminent. Gordon also designed the unpopular Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth - demolished in 2004 - and the Michael Faraday Memorial at Elephant and Castle in south London./ppstrongApollo Pavilion, Peterlee, by Victor Pasmore (1963-1970)/strongbr /Controversial piece of abstract public art in the Sunny Blunts housing estate. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund has recently been awarded for its restoration./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture"Architecture/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Artscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227399527393112300260553996"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Artscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227399527393112300260553996" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

As Congress debates whether to authorize a multibillion-dollar bailout of the U.S. automotive industry, several media outlets, notably New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, nationally syndicated radio host Lars Larson, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews, have used data that combines the average cost of current wages and benefits and future benefits to falsely assert or suggest that autoworkers make $70 or more per hour. But, as analysts and some media outlets have noted, the figure includes not only future retirement benefits for current workers, but also benefits paid to current retirees. Further, the "Big Three" U.S. automobile makers negotiated with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 2007 to significantly reduce the salary and benefits packages for certain new employees, a fact that Larson and Matthews did not note.

Despite the misleading nature of the $70 per hour claim, it continues to be repeated. In a November 17 New York Times column, Sorkin described General Motors employees' benefits as "off the charts": "At G.M., as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs." Contrary to Sorkin's suggestion, the "health care and pension costs" include health care and pension benefits for current retirees, and not what an "average worker was paid," according to GM. The Associated Press reported:

GM, which negotiated the four-year deal that serves as a template for UAW deals with Chrysler and Ford, says its total hourly labor costs dropped 6 percent this year from pre-contract levels, from $73.26 in 2006 to around $69 per hour. The new cost includes laborers' wages of $29.78 per hour, plus benefits, pensions and the cost of providing health care to more than 432,000 GM retirees, GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said.

On the November 20 edition of Hardball, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow James Gattuso stated, "I think that there's no reason that a UAW worker should get total compensation of $70 an hour when the average American only makes about $25 an hour in total compensation." Matthews responded, in part: "They negotiate for their salaries, and they're getting 70 bucks. So that's how the free market works." While speaking about the "unskilled, high-school graduate workers" in U.S. auto plants on his November 19 radio show, Larson said, "When you're paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you're going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately." Contrary to Gattuso's, Matthew's, and Larson's assertions, a UAW worker is not "get[ting] total compensation of $70 an hour."

In a November 18 post on his American Prospect blog criticizing Sorkin's reporting, economist Dean Baker wrote that the $70 figure Sorkin used is distorted by conflating "legacy" costs -- medical benefits and pensions paid to retirees -- with current labor costs:

The New York Times told readers that GM's autoworkers are paid $70 an hour (including health care and pension). This is not true. The base pay is about $28 an hour. If health care cost per worker average $12,000 per year, that adds in another $6 an hour. If the pension payment takes up 25 percent of base pay (an extremely high pension), that gets you another $7 an hour, bringing the total to $41 an hour. That's decent pay, but still a long way from $70 an hour.

How does the NYT get from $41 to $70? Well the trick is to add in GM's legacy costs, the pension and health care costs for retired workers. These legacy costs are a serious expense for GM, but this is not money being paid to current workers. The person on the line in 2008 is not benefiting from these legacy costs.

The UAW also notes that the auto companies frequently inflate their labor costs by combining all of the expenses attached to maintaining their workforce:

In addition to regular hourly pay, the labor cost figures cited by the companies include other expenses associated with having a person on payroll. This includes overtime, shift premiums and the costs of negotiated benefits such as holidays, vacations, health care, pensions and education and training. It also includes statutory costs, which employers are required to pay by law, such as federal contributions for Social Security and Medicare, and state payments to workers' compensation and unemployment insurance funds. The highest figures sometimes cited also include the benefit costs of retirees who are no longer on the payroll.

From Sorkin's November 17 New York Times column:

G.M. currently employs about 8,000 people who actually don't come to work. Those who do go to work are paid about $10 to $20 an hour more than people who do the same job building cars in the United States for foreign makers like Toyota. At G.M., as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs.

Those costs are already coming down slightly because of a renegotiated deal with U.A.W. last year, but not nearly enough.

From the November 19 broadcast of Westwood One's The Lars Larson Show:

LARSON: When Detroit is making cars at $73 an hour to its line workers, its unskilled, high-school graduate workers, and I'm a high school graduate as well. When you're paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you're going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately.

From the November 20 edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: Don't we need factory workers to be a healthy society?

GATTUSO: Well, first off, in the auto industry, were -- it's not a matter of losing factory workers to keyboards. It's -- to a large extent, losing factory -- UAW jobs for non-UAW jobs. Jobs in Michigan for jobs in Tennessee --

MATTHEWS: Do you think that's a good change? That's a good --

GATTUSO: -- or jobs in Michigan for jobs in Indiana.

MATTHEWS: You like having non-union labor? Is that a healthy thing?

GATTUSO: I think that there's no reason that a UAW worker should get total compensation of $70 an hour when the average American only makes about $25 an hour in total compensation.

MATTHEWS: Well, you negotiate for your salary, and they negotiate for --

GATTUSO: And there's no reason that the average American should have to pay for that UAW worker.

MATTHEWS: Sir, you negotiate for your salary at the Heritage Foundation or wherever. They negotiate for their salaries, and they're getting 70 bucks. So that's how the free market works.

GATTUSO: And if Heritage didn't have the money to pay me -- which, you know, I hope they do -- but if they didn't have the money to pay me, I wouldn't go to the government asking for more money. I would have to take a lower salary.

MATTHEWS: Touché.

This is a guest post by Kathlyn Clore, Associate Editor at the European Journalism Centre who was kind enough to write this report for us after attending the press event.

A cadre of European politicians gathered Thursday at the Museum of the 18th century in Brussels to launch Europeana, a digital museum that allows visitors to explore classic paintings, photos, recordings and texts in the same manner in which it is possible to search, say, Amazon.com.

Trying to access Europeana on the day of its launch, though, was akin to navigating the Vatican Museums in the tourist-thick month of August. It was impossible to see anything, as the project’s three servers were totally overwhelmed.

The Commission said Saturday in a press release that the site received about 10 million hits per hour throughout Thursday - double server capacity. The site was taken down Friday evening and is expected to be back up in mid-December.

Europeana’s three servers are located in the Hague, where the project is headquartered, but programmers plan eventually to put mirror servers around the world.

A pair of Dutchmen programmed Europeana in about 10 weeks, said technical developer Eric Van der Meulen. They added the final two of 21 European languages, Finnish and Hungarian, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.

Europeana, which is still in beta, was programmed using only open source applications, Van der Meulen said.

“Once we get the thing finished and stabilized, we want to be able to put this down as an open source application so other people can look at it and go, ‘Ok how did you do this?,’ and ‘Wow, maybe we can use this for something.’ The future of computing is open source and not only that but you can get a lot of input from all over the world this way.”

Technical challenges included harvesting and normalizing metadata from more than 1,000 different museums and libraries from around Europe. Half of participating cultural heritage institutions so far are French. The Louvre in Paris, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (which contributed footage shot on French battlefields in 1914) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam are three of the biggest participating museums.

Europeana is an outgrowth of The European Library, on which Van der Meulen also worked. But it has in the press been compared to Google’s Library Project. Copyright concerns are abundant in all three projects.

Viviane Reding, European commissioner for media, worked to bring the European Digital Library to fruition prior to realizing Europeana.

Issues of intellectual property will certainly complicate Reding’s goal of adding 10 million more objects over the next two years. The project will receive 2 million Euro over the next two years for that goal, said European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso on Thursday. For now, all objects on Europeana are in the public domain.

Reding said Thursday that she encourages users of the site to ‘remix’ what’s available. Moving forward, she plans to facilitate dialogue among various stakeholders to find a way to legally include contemporary works. Nobody wants a black hole when it comes to artifacts from the 21st century, she stated. In particular, she said she will continue discussions with books publishers in order to arrange for digitization of orphan works.

The difference between Europeana and existing library projects, though, is in the diversity of digital objects available on Europeana. Van der Meulen, for example, is able to search the names of his family members and come to a recording of his uncle’s 1970s rock band, the Makkers, or photos of his father Leendert Van der Muelen, a world-class cyclist.

“It’s for a lot of people that way,” he said. “Its a fun toy. Everybody Googles their name, you know. Only with this you get associations with your own name that you wouldn’t find in Google.”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/40701?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+Outrage+in+Venice+as+giant+ads+smother+cultural+jewelsch=World+newsc3=The+Guardianc4=Italy+%28News%29%2CVenice+in+Italy+%28Travel%29%2CAdvertising+%28media%29%2CMedia%2CTravel%2CWorld+newsc5=European+Travel%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CMedia+Weekly%2CAdvertising+Mediac6=John+Hooperc7=2008_11_22c8=1122179c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Italyc13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FItaly" width="1" height="1" //divpFrancesco da Mosto was spitting with fury. "Venice," he said, "has put its dignity up for sale." The architect-turned-presenter of a string of popular TV series was commenting on the giant hoardings put up in some of the most aesthetically sensitive parts of his native city./ppSince the end of August, a vast Lancia car has been parked on the front of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. A giant Rolex watch has been draped over the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, also in St Mark's Square. And, by the Grand Canal, the facade of the Ca' Rezzonico palazzo has been smothered with an advert for jeans. "We have reached the point at which there is a naked woman - covered only by a bag - on the front of a church," raged Da Mosto./ppWhat makes him especially irate is that 10 years ago he asked officials if money could be raised for one restoration project by giving a sponsor a small amount of space on a discreet depiction of the building used to mask scaffolding. "The sponsor would not have had more than 2% of the surface of the hoarding, but they said no," he recalled./ppWhat has changed since is that cash has been bled from the management of Italy's arts and heritage as politicians have struggled to keep public spending within the limits imposed by membership of the euro. Disputes over lucre have poisoned the atmosphere in some of the most refined settings, including La Scala in Milan./ppThe latest cuts were ordered after Silvio Berlusconi returned to office in April - euro;922m (pound;766m) off the culture budget over three years. Cultural administrators have been ravenous for funding, and less choosy about how to get it. /ppRenata Codello, the central government's heritage administrator in Venice, said her budget was down by a quarter. "If the geniuses who criticise us give me the money for the restorations, I'll do away with [the giant ads] at once," she said. "Otherwise, they should keep quiet. We don't have alternatives." /ppJust one of the hoardings in St Mark's Square will yield a reported euro;3.6m./ppFears of even more jarring initiatives were this week rife after Italy's culture minister, Sandro Bondi, unveiled his own response to the crisis - the appointment of the former head of McDonald's in Italy to be overall chief of museums and archaeological sites./ppBondi's predecessor, Francesco Rutelli, said 63-year-old Mario Resca was "wholly unqualified" and the government's top advisory body, the National Heritage Council, appealed for his appointment to be suspended. Resca himself dismissed warnings of the "burgerisation" of Italy's rich heritage, telling Corriere della Sera this week that it needed to be "valued and certainly not ruined". /ppHe noted that not one Italian museum was among the world's 10 most visited; even the Galleria degli Uffizi, in Florence, packed with Renaissance treasures, draws barely 60% of the figure for the Prado in Madrid. Resca said he intended negotiating with the unions for seven-day opening, so creating "thousands of new jobs"./ppSome of his other ideas, though, will do nothing to quell the controversy surrounding him. He said he would be happy to see the Colosseum used as a film set, arguing it would make "the cultural message more popular"./ppAmong those who welcomed his appointment was Michele Trimarchi, professor of cultural economics at Bologna University. He said Resca could administer an "injection of new perspectives and visions". /ppAs it was, museums and other cultural institutions in Italy were not autonomous bodies but government departments, so directors lacked "incentives to carry out projects of any sort". Funding was "unconnected to any sort of performance criteria". And there was no overall national strategy that could provide guidelines in cases such as the Venice hoardings. "We love our culture," said Trimarchi. "But we don't know why we manage it the way we do."/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/italy"Italy/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/venice"Venice/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/advertising"Advertising/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Newscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660307112201400459684"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Newscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660307112201400459684" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/ba/cd/0009cdba.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/ba/cd/0009cdba_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_642490" alt="Religion and Anthropology"//a/divbr/ div class="center"bBrian Morris, "Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction"/bbr/ Cambridge University Press (2005) | English | ISBN: 0521617790 | 363 pages | PDF | 1.84 MB/divbr/ This book provides a readable, comprehensive and critical introduction to the extensive anthropological literature on religion that has been produced over the past forty years. It focuses on well-known, substantive ethnographic studies, specifically those which have embraced the dual heritage of social anthropology.

Europeana - universal prototype digital library of Europe Cultural heritage Launch was a success due to the site access problem http://www.xmail.net/technologos/ARTS.html and http://www.xmail.net/technologos/ and http://www.xmail.net/technologos/AAA.html

Auteur : TECHNOLOGOS
Tags : Europeana digital library Launch Europe Culture heritage
Envoyé : 21 novembre 2008
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