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[Keywords] Decorative Arts, Barcelona, Japonisme, Modernism, Aestheticism

[abstract]
At the end of the 19th century a fascination for all things Japanese arrived in Barcelona (Spain) influencing much of the artistic work in the city. Japanese art brought a new manner of understanding esthetic beauty that played an outstanding role in the process of the development of new forms of expression that attained a high degree of creativity in the epoch of Modernism. This paper aims to analyze and present an overview of the Japanese influence and its significance during the renovation process that affected Barcelona’s decorative arts in the last quarter of the 1800.

[Keywords] functionalist furniture, first avant-garde movements, Le Corbusier; GATCPAC, vernacular

[abstract]
This paper proposes a short revision of the history of design put in the context of historic avant-garde. The study of documents and original sources offers a new approach to historiography interpretations. In that sense, as far as the traditional and classical approach to the period, usually following Pevsner, has repeated and spread the same interpretation of design always pointing at the universalizing aim of any product while forgetting its belonging to a specific place. This paper proposes a new vision of the period and also will present some writings and professional proposals spread during the twenties and thirties that have been hushed up. What has been found is a stream focused on Mediterranianism and Latinism defended by Le Corbusier and spread all over through his links with Catalonia, Italy, France and Central Europe. Thus, in front of that functionalist furniture so German in spirit stand all those models which find its roots in vernacular productions of the Latin world. From that point of view, the period acquires new references which talking about a particular place suggests that there have been many aesthetic trends that inform contemporary design.

[Keywords] Aesthetics, City, Scenery, Architecture, Judgment

[abstract]
Examples discussed in this article are showing that from the late Middle Ages all through the Renaissance, there existed an idea of the city as scenery imagined as a metaphorical ground for interpreting different social and cultural values. In that context, the aesthetic categories relevant to the process of imagining the city as scenery are directly anticipating the observer’s aesthetic respond to the emotionally created character of the scenery. From the mediaeval time, urban space reflected metaphorically the regional space and its essentially performing and theatrical characteristics. More precisely, in the twelfth and thirteenth century western European literature, the city has been interpreted as an urban mirabilia, miraculous scenery of many important events. However, in the thirteenth century the city is becoming a matrix of an ideological system. It is a social urban utopia, which success depends on the coordination between the actual story and the cultural and psychological heritage of the citizens and their system of values in the context of the time. These components of experiencing beauty of the city seem to develop further into a particular ethical concept under the influence of the philosophy of humanism. This was a kind of process through which man express’ his longing for acting as necessity in creating an ambivalent world. In this world rationality and irrationality are correlated in a complex way through the form of architectural and urban scenery. Far from rationalized aspects, intuition and emotion as aesthetic values, are now interpreting the ethical bond between individual and eternal aspects of humanity.

[Keywords] Musical iconography, Spain, Catalonia, Modernism

[abstract]
The Palau de la Música Catalana is a concert hall that has a wide range of material, which is significant for its architectural, religious and folk aspects, and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1997. Although the decoration of the Palau de la Música Catalana is often a clear reference to the owner, the Orfeó Català, and to Lluís Millet, its director, it also exhibits the influence of Felip Pedrell.
This study aims to analyze iconographic musical scenes from throughout the building and tries to justify the influence of Pedrell in them.

[keywords] humor, form, graphics, creation, contextualization, topicality, transgression, complicity
[abstract]
A careful and precise mechanism is needed to create transgression graphics since their mission is to communicate the incorrect. The formation of any visual message is complicated by an appropriate transparency, which attempts to avoid foreseeable interferences between emitter and receiver. However, upon adding deliberately inappropriate content, the task becomes doubly complex because it must somehow visually advise the observer of the abnormality in such a way that the message will be perceived in its correct sense and that the transgression will be accepted by him or her without question. Furthermore, if its purpose is, as in the case of humor, to obtain a playful interaction with the spectator, then previous conceptual planning and a concrete resolution of the utilized visual symbology are required. Everything is ordered to give significance to the transgressed situation and to reach the goal of viewer complicity. As a result, the central content of this study will be the structure of graphic humor.