Materiality considerations for attestation engagements involving aspects of subject matters that cannot be quantitatively measured

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_sop/1918/thumbnail.jp

The Roman heritage of building materials, between restoring antiquity and designing modernity: Calza, Gismondi, and De Vico’s contribution in ancient Ostia and Rome.

During the 1920s excavations at ancient Ostia, Guido Calza, Italo Gismondi, and Raffaele De Vico significantly influenced the interpretation and reuse of ancient materials in both restoration and modern construction, shaped by the Fascist regime's promotion of a "Roman spirit." This study examines their contributions: Calza's theoretical perspectives, Gismondi's graphic documentation, and De Vico's practical restorations. De Vico's restoration of the Ostia theatre exemplifies the revival of Republican-era aesthetics, utilizing tuff rock (“Petrara”) quarried near Veio, a material also featured in his modern projects like parks, fountains, and aqueducts. These works employed ancient techniques and materials to embody monumentality and continuity, as seen in designs like the Via Eleniana reservoir and Colle Oppio Park. By integrating historical materials with contemporary needs, their work bridged antiquity and modernity, reinforcing an archaeological and architectural legacy

Display Clash. The Diorama and/as Wunderkammer in Contemporary Art

From a historical point of view, the natural habitat diorama and the Wunderkammer are mutually excluding displays that stand for two distinct ways to approach the world. Whereas the Wunderkammer of the 16th and 17th century was conceived as an encyclopedic collection gathering all kinds of objects ranging from natural history, ethnography, religious relics, antiquities to work of arts in order to constitute a theatrical microcosm of the world, the habitat diorama aimed to be a “window on nature” (Frank M. Chapman) supposed to convey a truthful depiction of a group of animals within their natural surroundings. In an evolutionary perspective, the Wunderkammer, based on principles such as heterogeneity, association, allegory, and analogical thinking has been replaced, since the 19th century, by the specialization of scientific disciplines and museums, a tendency of which the diorama as a biological model of natural history is a paradigmatic example. Yet, in recent times it seems that the limits between these historically and epistemologically diverging models of world representation are increasingly put to the test. On the one hand, Natural History Museums such as the Musée des Confluences in Lyon rediscover the Wunderkammer (chambre des merveilles) as an alternative way to display nature. On the other hand, numerous artists such as Mark Dion, Thomas Hirschhorn and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, already since the late 1990s, combine Wunderkammer and diorama in order to challenge institutional forms of knowledge, representation and information. In the tradition of surrealist exhibition displays and Dadaist collage techniques, these artists create contested spaces where specific systems of representation clash and compete. This paper will discuss Mark Dion’s Mobile Wilderness Units, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Diorama as critical laboratory, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Chronotopes. Each of these works is a different form of integrating the diorama in a widely ramified network of historical, cultural, ecological and aesthetic issues. Dion examines the link between “changes in museum method” and “shifts in the construction of the social category of nature”. Hirschhorn transforms the diorama into a kind of “non-lieux”, “a space without hierarchy” that questions the legitimizing discourses of the exhibition hall. Gonzalez-Foerster’s book-dioramas, finally, melt fact and fiction, illusion and narrative, in order to stress issues of ecological, biological and cultural endangerment. What all of them have in common is that they conceive the diorama not as a self-contained system but as an open intermedia space that is constantly in exchange with other forms of representation from different historical, social and cultural contexts. As such they constitute a “milieu” in the sense of Jacques Rancière’s definition of media, that is an environment that both represents and (re)configures a particular technical and social reality