A model of relations of value of property sites on the case of Ljubljana

A model of relations of value of property sites on the case of Ljubljana

Author(s): Franc J. Zakrajšek,Petra Zakrajšek,Vlasta Vodeb / Language(s): Slovenian / Issue: 2/2004

Keywords: Ljubljana; model; property; site value

The proposed model is a computer aided system for evaluating the value of spatial sites of properties, both present as well as simulations of future conditions following hypothetical directions of development, strategic or concrete spatial decisions. The model is built on classical methods of mass appraisal of property, which are supported by a geographical information model. It introduces significant novelties in the field: the use of methods of analytical hierarchical processing for determining technical coefficients of site advantages. The model was developed in the research Development and implementation of a regional simulation model for the Ljubljana urban region, financed by the City municipality of Ljubljana.

Clustering with limitations as a method of regionalisation (case study: forming problem regions in Slovenia)

Clustering with limitations as a method of regionalisation (case study: forming problem regions in Slovenia)

Author(s): Simon Kušar / Language(s): Slovenian / Issue: 2/2004

Keywords: quantitative methods; clustering with limitations; region homogenous region; regional planning; regionalization

Regionalisation is a procedure that enables the creation of regions. Clustering with relation limitation can be used as s a method for the creation of homogenous regions that are spatial units characterized by internal homogeneity and geographical contiguousity. Certain problems are associated with the application of areas with special developmental problems in Slovenia. An attempt has been made to overcome them by clustering municipalities (NUTS 5), which have the same combination of types of problem areas, and by the formation of problem regions as the spatial units for assuring place prosperity. According to the Slovene regional policy, the results of clustering should better be called problem sub-regions, since they are smaller than statistical regions (NUTS 3), which are used as spatial units for the creation of regional development programmes. Problem sub-regions can be used as the spatial basis for creation of joint development programmes, and as such can be used in practice as well.

The Centre of Europe before and after the Fall of the Central Powers (Elizabeth Clegg)

The Centre of Europe before and after the Fall of the Central Powers (Elizabeth Clegg)

Author(s): Éva Forgács / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Elizabeth Clegg: Art, Design & Architecture in Central Europe 1890–1920. Yale University Press, 2006, 305 pages, 300 black and white and colour reproductions.

From Christian Shield to EU Member

From Christian Shield to EU Member

Author(s): Ignác Romsics / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

The history of the Magyar people in the Carpathian Basin may be divided into four periods. The first lasted from the establishment of the medieval Hungarian state until its fall in 1526. Short periods of crisis aside, over these first five hundred years, the Kingdom of Hungary was among the most powerful and influential states in Europe. The second major period began in 1526 and lasted until the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. During this century and a half, the Kingdom of Hungary was reduced to a narrow strip of land stretching along its old northern and western borders, now associated with or subordinated to, the Habsburg family’s other Central European possessions. A large slice, lying between the extensive plains between the Danube and Tisza rivers and the mountains of Transylvania, was under the direct rule of the Turkish sultan. A new state was established in the east in the form of the Principality of Transylvania from the latter half of the sixteenth century; this paid an annual tribute as a vassal state to the Porte but, in exchange, was allowed to exercise a considerable degree of independence. The third main period may be dated from the final expulsion of the Ottoman Turks in the late seventeenth century and from the recognition of the Habsburgs’ hereditary right to the throne (for the male line in 1687, for the female line in 1723) until the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. During this period, the Hungarian state or state bodies were, with varying degrees of autonomy, integral parts of the Habsburg Empire. The fourth period dates from after the First World War, when the Hungarian state, for the first time in close to half a millennium, once again became sovereign in terms of international law; however, its territory had shrunk to one third that of its former extent, and more than a third of ethnic Hungarians—in all some 3.3 million people—found themselves living outside the country’s new frontiers. This disposition by the Great Powers was confirmed in the aftermath of the Second World War and by the arrangements which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The aim of this article is to characterize the political thinking that attended each of these four major historical epochs; the place that the country’s political and intellectual elites envisioned for the Hungarian people among the other nations of Europe; and the distinctive role or task they saw it fulfilling.

Struck by Apollo! Remembering György Ligeti

Struck by Apollo! Remembering György Ligeti

Author(s): György Kurtág / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Orbituary, speech of mourning? For me he’s more alive than ever. For months my small study in St. André has been filled with his compositions, writings and speeches, with essays, articles and commemorative texts about him. Again and again I read the scores and listen to all the recordings I can get my hands on. In front of me is his life’s work—perhaps even his life. No end of things I’d like to tell him, including what I've finally understood about his music after decades. Perhaps there are correlations that only I’ve discovered now. So many things I’d like to ask. Sometimes his later works give answers, but other times it seems hopeless because he's not here to explain them. [...]

Worlds Apart (Imre Oravecz, Péter Farkas, Ervin Lázár)

Worlds Apart (Imre Oravecz, Péter Farkas, Ervin Lázár)

Author(s): Csaba Károlyi / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Imre Oravecz: Ondrok gödre (The Ditch of Ondrok). Pécs, Jelenkor, 2007, 384 pp. Péter Farkas: Nyolc perc (Eight Minutes). Budapest, Magvetô, 2007, 111 pp. Ervin Lázár: Csillagmajor (Star Farmstead). Budapest, Osiris, 2005,184 pp.

Absolutely Animated. Áron Gauder, Géza M. Tóth and György Szemadám in Conversation with László Kolozsi

Absolutely Animated. Áron Gauder, Géza M. Tóth and György Szemadám in Conversation with László Kolozsi

Author(s): László Kolozsi / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

The Annecy International Festival is the single most important shop window for animated films. A good showing there greatly improves a film’s chance of global distribution, award winners gain peer and industry respect. Áron Gauder’s The District (see HQ 180) carried off the prize for the best feature-length European animation in 2005. Now Géza M. Tóth’s Maestro has arguably gone one better by being Oscar nominated for the best animated film of 2006. Its single long take features a cuckoo looking at itself in a dressing-room mirror while waiting to get a drink and a brush-down from its dresser before going on stage. Not too long ago, Hungarian animation went through a bad patch, when money was hard to find for production or distribution. Has it pulled through? That was one of the questions put to Áron Gauder and Géza M. Tóth, the directors, and to György Szemadám, a key figure on the distribution side. Once a lion tamer, György Szemadám has made a name for himself as a graphic artist and author. He is on the advisory board of the Hungarian Motion Picture Public Foundation, a crucial source of financing in Hungary. Although the 2004 Motion Picture Act offers attractive tax breaks, private finance is simply not available for animated films, with state subsidy being the main source.

Comic Morals (György Spiró, Kornél Hamvai)

Comic Morals (György Spiró, Kornél Hamvai)

Author(s): Tamás Koltai / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

György Spiró: Prah • Kornél Hamvai: Szigliget (Writer’s Retreat)

Prince (Short Story)

Prince (Short Story)

Author(s): György Dragomán / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Poems, translated by George Szirtes and Antony Dunn

Poems, translated by George Szirtes and Antony Dunn

Author(s): László G. István / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Pál Rosti (1830–1874) Traveller and Photographer

Pál Rosti (1830–1874) Traveller and Photographer

Author(s): Júlia Papp / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

No history of 20th-century photography would be complete without mentioning photographers László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Martin Munkacsi, Robert Capa, Brassaï, George Kepes or Lucien Hervé, who left Hungary to become famous abroad. However, the history of photography in Hungary goes back much further, to the late 1830s. Louis Daguerre’s invention was announced on January 7th, 1839 at the French Academy; less than a month later the Pest journal Hasznos Mulatságok (Useful Diversions) printed news of this. In the spring of 1839, Daguerre presented pictures he himself had made to the Emperor Ferdinand V, Metternich and to Count Antal Apponyi, the Austrian minister in Paris. In 1840 a book on photography was published in Hungarian, and there was an exhibition organized by the Pesti Mûegylet (Art Society of Pest) displaying three daguerreotypes that had presumably been brought from Paris. To our current knowledge, the first photographs in Hungary were also taken in 1840. In that August, Antal Vállas, a professor at the university in Pest, presented two daguerreotypes that he had taken from a window of the chamber in which the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was sitting: they show the Danube bank and the Royal Castle across the river in Buda. The painter Jakab Marastoni (born Giacomo Maraston in Venice), the first professional photographer active in Hungary, opened his studio in January 1841. To date, more than 40 daguerreotypers are known to have been active in Hungary between 1840 and 1850, and the number of daguerreotypes they produced is estimated at several thousand.

Suspended Animation

Suspended Animation

Author(s): Klára Muhi / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Two years ago a brash, witty, low-budget animated feature, replete with rap speech patterns, attained almost instant cult status after its release, selling something over 100,000 tickets at the Hungarian box-office. The District was a debut film for both its codirectors, Áron Gauder and Emil Novák. The whores, cops, petty criminals and Roma who feature in the film are all drawn in twodimensional photorealist-style animation. The leading figures are a group of teenagers (accurately reflecting Budapest’s Eighth District’s ethnic mix) who use a time machine to travel back into prehistory and gun down whole herds of mammoths, because their giant corpses, in the distant future, will turn into oil, and the oil into lots of money, which, with Osama bin Laden himself being holed up in the district, will give the “Eightfers” some say in how the world goes on. The main character, a Roma Romeo by the name of Ritchie Lakatos, his pockets lined with dosh, is now at last in a position—against his father’s total opposition—to pursue his Julia, who comes from a family who are their deadly rivals. Needless to say, the gushing new oil wells in the Eighth District set off a string of international repercussions. The film was successful not just at the box office but on the festival circuit as well, carrying off the top award for the best feature film at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which is the Cannes of animation.[...]

Ferenc Molnár: The Plays and the Wives (Katalin Varga and Tamás Gajdó, eds.)

Ferenc Molnár: The Plays and the Wives (Katalin Varga and Tamás Gajdó, eds.)

Author(s): Mátyás Sárközi / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Katalin Varga and Tamás Gajdó (eds.): …or not to be. Molnár Ferenc levelei Darvas Lilihez (…or not to be: Ferenc Molnár’s Letters to Lili Darvas). Budapest, Argumentum/Petôfi Irodalmi Múzeum, 2003, 145 pp.

Of Remembering and Forgetting (Michael Korda)

Of Remembering and Forgetting (Michael Korda)

Author(s): George Gömöri / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Michael Korda: Journey to a Revolution. A Personal Memoir and History of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. New York, HarperCollins, 2006, 221 pp.

Itinerary (Part 2)

Itinerary (Part 2)

Author(s): Tamás Blum / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Memoir

Blum’s Way

Blum’s Way

Author(s): Iván Bächer / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Memoir

A Life and an Exit (Balázs Ablonczy)

A Life and an Exit (Balázs Ablonczy)

Author(s): John Lukacs / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Balázs Ablonczy: Pál Teleki (1874–1941): The Life of a Controversial Hungarian Politician. Translated from the Hungarian by Thomas J. and Helen D. DeKornfeld. East European Monographs. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 339 pp.

Brassaï: The Hungarian Documents. A Chronology in Letters 1940–1984

Brassaï: The Hungarian Documents. A Chronology in Letters 1940–1984

Author(s): Károly Kincses / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

As co-editor of the series History of Hungarian Photography, published by the Museum of Hungarian Photography in Kecskemét, I have worked on the oeuvre of almost fifty Hungarian photographers over some twenty years. The series has included several photographers who left Hungary when quite young, such as André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, Márton Munkácsi and Robert Capa. Most recently, my colleagues and I have spent two years studying the life and work of Brassaï (born in 1899 as Gyula Halász), including research on his relatives and friends, alive or deceased. During this project, two events helped to place Brassaï’s work in an entirely new light. The first of these was a 2006 auction in France, where 550 vintage Brassaï photographs were sold to private collectors, dealers, galleries and public collections for tens of thousands of euros, the first such auction since the deaths of Brassaï (1984) and his widow Gilberte (2005). The second event was an unexpected stroke of luck, of the kind any museum will experience only once. As in a fairy tale, a man arrived in Budapest from Bras¸ov in Transylvania, after a 12-hour train journey, carrying two enormous, musty-smelling folders. Opening the folders, we found 221 original Brassaï letters, along with postcards, early drawings, signed photos, newspaper clippings—a total of 637 items, which were offered to us at a very reasonable price. Although the museum was unable to purchase the material, their possessor donated forty letters to the museum, and we acquired copies of the other documents as well.

The Ultimate Fugue (Zoltán Göncz)

The Ultimate Fugue (Zoltán Göncz)

Author(s): János Malina / Language(s): English / Issue: 188/2007

Johann Sebastian Bach: Contrapunctus 14 für Orgel aus der Kunst der Fuge. Arranged by Zoltán Göncz. Stuttgart, Carus-Verlag, 2006, 20 pp.

Nominalizm a główne tezy "Księcia" Niccola Machiavellego

Nominalism and the main theses of "Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli

Author(s): Radosław Małek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 26/2008

Keywords: nominalism; politics; individual; community; liberalism

In general, the fundamental problem for the philosophy of politics is taking a stand in the argument: man as an individual (and the conception of ego) and community. Apriorically, this assumption is the basis for the whole thought construction of all points of view in the philosophy of politics. The author of the article makes an attempt to prove that Machiavelli, representing a nominalistic standpoint, gives the basis for the underpinnings of the philosophy of liberalism. The author of "Prince" “deprives the world of its illusions”. His method of perceiving the world consists in the synthesis of sensual impressions and search for the confirmation of these syntheses in the interpretation of historical events. "Prince" is based on this method. It constitutes a type of a catechism of behaviours by means of which we can achieve success in ruling out (success can be achieved by anyone if he/she learns well the mechanism operating in the surrounding world) and, thus, virtu is more important than a fortune. If an individual obeys the rules from "Prince" and rules (being bad from time to time), achieves success, but this success is at the same time the peace for the mass. It does not matter if the "Prince" rules out well. What matters is the plebs’ conviction that the "Prince" rules out well and does not rebel making any revolts. The evil (deceit, fraud, the lack of intention of realizing any values) is sometimes blissful and lead to the good (the peace of the subjects). That is what the world is, was, and will be about. It is honest in this strange sense of the word (after all one can learn this "Prince").