Financial services firm accelerates digital resilience and regulatory readiness Wüstenrot Gruppe is a long-established Austrian financial services organization known for its expertise in building society savings insurance and pension solutions covering over one million Austrians an evolving product portfolio and a commitment to digital innovation makes Wüstenrot a key player in the Austrian financial services sector “We are partnering with Kyndryl to modernize our IT infrastructure with the aim to further develop our product portfolio scale efficiently and continue our digital innovation initiatives,” said Roland Freitag we are strengthening our digital interfaces improving the quality of our services and partnerships and ensuring that Wüstenrot Gruppe remains a major force contributing to a stable and innovative Austrian financial services sector.” “Businesses like Wüstenrot Gruppe that embrace IT modernization can gain tangible business benefits,” said Maria Kirschner “By leveraging Kyndryl’s deep mainframe skills and expertise and the flexible zCloud environment Wüstenrot Gruppe can continue to deliver reliable customer services improve resilience and ensure regulatory compliance This enables them to move toward greater digital agility and operational excellence.” Wüstenrot Gruppe completed the first phase of the IT transformation project by migrating mainframe workloads from its third-party data center to Kyndryl’s secure on-demand zCloud platform in its state-of-the-art new strategic environment This transition accelerates Wüstenrot Group’s broader digital transformation efforts the new strategic data center offers high availability Sustainability measures and integration into Kyndryl’s global ecosystem enhance Wüstenrot Gruppe’s competitive edge Kyndryl and Wüstenrot Gruppe plan to improve resiliency by implementing a Parallel Sysplex configuration to manage multiple systems and resources and share their applications and data from a single platform Kyndryl ranked as a leader in ISG Provider Lens™ Quadrant Report 2025 for Mainframes – Services and Solutions Harnessing mainframe power: How Kyndryl helps customers tap into z17's advanced capabilities Kyndryl expands partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate mainframe modernization for customers with generative AI Financial services group to use Kyndryl's zCloud environment Austrian financial services company Wüstenrot Gruppe has selected Kyndryl for its mainframe modernization project The first phase of the modernization project was completed in 2024 with Wüstenrot Gruppe migrating its mainframe workloads from a third-party data center to the Kyndryl zCloud platform in its new "strategic environment." Kyndryl's zCloud allows companies to host and integrate IBM Z workloads into the cloud the companies aim to improve resiliency by implementing a Parallel Sysplex configuration to manage multiple systems and resources from a single platform and continue our digital innovation initiatives,” said Roland Freitag improving the quality of our services and partnerships and ensuring that Wüstenrot Gruppe remains a major force contributing to a stable and innovative Austrian financial services sector.” Details about Wüstenrot Gruppe's data center footprint have not been shared DCD has contacted the company for more information Wüstenrot Gruppe is comprised of four companies: Wüstenrot Bausparkasse and also has an IT services company called Wüstenrot Technology GmbH In the company's Annual Report for 2023 it wrote that Wüstenrot Gruppe had taken "decisive steps" as part of its effort to drive digital transformation In a written interview included in the report Wolfgang Hanzl CIO and COO of Wüstenrot Gruppe and Wüstenrot Bank said of the group's plans for 2024: "We have ambitious plans: the further development of our legacy systems so that we can offer state-of-the-art solutions and services We want to leverage nearshoring partnerships and generate maximum added value for the Wüstenrot Group." The report added that the group intends to outsource its data center services to its subsidiary Wüstenrot Technology GmbH The year 2023 saw other administrative expenses primarily including data center and other IT costs of €13 million ($14m) up from €10.86m ($11.71m) in 2022 A 2024 Annual Report has yet to be released Kyndryl was previously IBM's Managed Infrastructure Services business until it was spun out in 2021. Earlier this year, the UK's Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) extended its contract with Kyndryl for another year for £2.28 million ($2.83m) Data Centre Dynamics Ltd (DCD), 32-38 Saffron Hill, London, EC1N 8FH Email. [email protected]DCD is a subsidiary of InfraXmedia W&W is moving toward an open cloud approach managing its on-premises workloads and servers in Azure and reducing operational costs and complexity with Azure Arc With Azure Arc fully part of its infrastructure W&W enjoys more efficiency and flexibility and employees have more time for strategic work among other benefits that cascade down to customers Wustenrot & Wurttembergische (W&W) is home to around 13,000 people who are dedicated to delivering industry-leading insurance and banking services to customers across Germany As companies like W&W increasingly digitize and transform their financial services including how their customers manage bank accounts technology flexibility has become key to enabling business growth This recently led W&W to seek new ways to optimize its infrastructure as it reached the contract end date for its legacy on-premises software and better support its employees working on the field and in W&W offices We‘ve been able to automate our whole update management system and remove all the dependencies and custom scripts that we built.” a subsidiary of Wüstenrot & Württembergische While attending the Microsoft Ignite event in 2019, W&W learned about Azure Arc as a potential pathway to hybrid cloud management given its need for certain workloads to remain on-premises for local regulatory compliance “Our cloud journey started at Ignite when Microsoft told us we could use Azure Arc to manage our on-premises services in the cloud,” says Björn Beigl System Engineer – Infrastructure at W&W Informatik a subsidiary of W&W that provides internal IT services to the 16 companies in the W&W Group “We recognized it as a good opportunity for us Starting small and extending rapidly, W&W is moving toward an open cloud approach, managing its on-premises workloads and servers in Azure and reducing operational costs and complexity with Azure Arc we didn’t need to evaluate any other solution—we knew we wanted exactly this,” says Beigl we realized that adopting Azure Arc could fix a lot of the problems we had with using our previous solution in a highly regulated IT environment.” W&W took time to fine-tune its hybrid model as it worked with Microsoft product groups and dedicated Microsoft contacts to get a selection of Azure services ready for its environment while those services were in private preview Connecting with a team from Azure engineering gave W&W added confidence that running hybrid would ultimately work best for its environment “We had to talk to our legal department and configure our existing proxy between our servers and the internet,” shares Michael Schenk we were able to add dedicated proxy functionality to our Azure Arc agent and get a proof of concept ready with 10 servers.” Instead of adopting a fully cloud-based approach W&W decided to rely on its on-premises structure but start tapping into the benefits of the cloud so we had no need to shift all of our infrastructure to the cloud,” explains Beigl “But some use cases and services are only available through the cloud so we like the fluid setup and the option to use new services that we couldn’t get with our old software.” Legal considerations also influenced W&W’s decision to move forward with Azure Arc and hybrid management the company won’t put any personal data on the public cloud Needing to maintain control of hosting its services W&W appreciated the ability to use Azure Arc to manage its services and infrastructure in the cloud while continuing to run out of its existing on-premises datacenters “We as the infrastructure team wanted to get something to the cloud but never had a use case,” says Beigl “We were really happy to do hybrid management with Azure Arc and have a steppingstone into what the Azure platform can offer.” we’re able to manage patching and get a compliance report of all the security settings of our Windows servers,” says Beigl “We also enabled Change Tracking and Inventory in Azure Automation and Azure Monitor on our VMs so that we can monitor the resource usage of our VMs and see the changes in software installations and registry services These are advantages that we didn’t have in the past W&W’s infrastructure teams now use Azure as a UI to get information faster than before The company supports those teams by easily accessing and building reports about compliance issues using the compliance dashboard in Azure Policy and runs a script to get those reports back to its infrastructure team and application developers This process is running so smoothly that W&W has left its old UI in the past “We‘ve been able to automate our whole update management system and remove all the dependencies and custom scripts that we built We can now touch servers faster and with more reliability and less manual work.” W&W had moved approximately 2,000 Windows servers to Azure Arc with automated scripts and update management groups These servers were fully up and running for the company’s first patch day in January 2022 Microsoft regularly publishes patches to servers and systems on Tuesdays and W&W responds by patching its test environment systems on Saturdays and production environment systems one week later “We’ve used Azure Arc to reduce the amount of time we need for our patch days by 35 percent,” Beigl shares so it’s a win-win for W&W and our customers that employees have more free time on the weekend and our system downtime is decreasing.” addressing critical security issues using out-of-band patches released outside of the normal production schedule “This would have been possible with our old software and complex scripts we’re so much more flexible with scheduling and creating new groups to get patches through different systems faster,” Schenk explains In addition to keeping track of patching status W&W has gained a single pane of glass view into all of its servers It manages both domain-joined servers and servers that aren’t domain-joined from the same portal and ensures that policies have been applied It has further automated patching now that its teams can quickly identify which systems have failed and which have problems with patch installation we’re exploring other Azure features and how we can use them to give our customers more value,” says Beigl “We can also think about additional automation so that the teams responsible for our servers can patch their systems on their own using Azure Arc and update management.” “It was the right decision to start this cloud journey by adopting Azure Arc and we look forward to doing more in the future,” says Beigl Find out more about Wüstenrot & Württembergische on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn “We’ve used Azure Arc to reduce the amount of time we need for our patch days by 35 percent.” We are Microsoft Empowering others Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more Josep Renau's restored mosaic The Unity of the Working Classes and Founding of the German Democratic Republic (1974 A vast mosaic depicting Karl Marx and celebrating the founding of East Germany and the “unity of the working class” was officially handed over to the city of Halle by the private foundation that funded its restoration today was completed in 1974 on the external wall of the stairwell of an 11-floor residence for apprentices in Halle-Neustadt a concrete new town built near the city of Halle during the Cold War to house workers at nearby chemical plants Halle-Neustadt’s population has dwindled to around 45,000—approximately half its peak in the 1960s The mosaic is one of the most important public works of art from communist East Germany cumbersomely titled The Unity of the Working Classes and Founding of the German Democratic Republic is 35m high and seven m wide and contains 11,000 tiles It is considered one of the most important surviving public works of art produced in communist East Germany much East German public art has been destroyed It is often dismissed as the remnant of an outdated ideology and deemed unimportant from an art-historical perspective But recent measures to save such works suggest a shift in such attitudes “Even uncomfortable East German cultural heritage shouldn’t just disappear—instead it should be preserved to encourage reflection and debate,” says Philip Kurz the managing director of the Wüstenrot Foundation which provided most of the €600,000 restoration funds The Wüstenrot Foundation has made preserving East German public art a focus of its heritage protection work the foundation completed the reinstallation of a Renau mosaic composed of 70,000 glass fragments in the city of Erfurt Renau was the culture official responsible for overseeing the famous Spanish pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937 Forced to flee Spain after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War There he met important exponents of Mexican muralism His first mural commission was in Halle-Neustadt Renau originally proposed an image celebrating the power of nature The newly restored Marx mosaic was one of two monumental murals by the artist in Halle-Neustadt: the other was installed on a nearby canteen and destroyed from 1998 to 1999 By the time the restoration of Unity of the Working Classes and Founding of the German Democratic Republic began in 2022 many of the tiles had been damaged or come loose due to frost and pollution led by the Gustav van Treeck studio in Munich mended tiles where possible and replaced 451 that were too damaged to repair news23 February 2024Early Gerhard Richter mural, painted over in 1979, resurfaces in DresdenPainting in a stairwell and foyer at the German Hygiene Museum is one of the few early works to survive Please read the details and accept the service to enable rating function Playing games on the computer is no longer just a “nerd hobby.” ESports team- and competition-oriented video games which is also used by companies outside the industry such as Uhlsport and Wüstenrot – primarily to attract a young target group.  Image credit: Twitter/ESLGamingESports is about to become one of the biggest the market volume in Germany will have reached 130 million euros by 2020 eSports is overtaking the German Ice Hockey League (DEL) and the German Basketball League (BBL) The Vice President of the eSport-Bund Deutschland can explain exactly what opportunities and challenges the booming eSports market will bring for sponsors Niklas Timmermann is responsible for all eSports teams and players in the ESBD and functions as a professional sports association for the nationwide organized sport of eSports and its athletes in Germany Niklas Timmermann speaks at ISPO Digitize.Image credit:ISPO.com/Markus Sebekwindow.adEntity = window.adEntity || {queue: []}; window.adEntity.queue.push(document.getElementById('ad-entity-83vekZIIb1s'));Three Million ESports Enthusiasts in GermanyeSports will become the second largest sport after soccer in just a few years’ time: “There are 35 million gamers in Germany alone.” According to Statista three million of them are even eSports enthusiasts (i.e they watch or participate in an eSports event at least once a month) And the number of fans is constantly growing: In 2017 alone 57.6 million people watched the final round of the League of Legends World Championship The eSports market offers companies several opportunities and benefits Many companies have already recognized this potential And they aren’t just tech companies like Nvidia The number of commitments by companies outside the industry has risen by almost 100 percent compared to 2017 17 brands have entered into partnerships with German rights holders The number of sponsors in eSports is growing.Image credit:ISPO.com/Markus SebekMercedes-Benz: Partnership with the ESLOne heavyweight in eSports is Mercedes-Benz The automotive manufacturer is working as a strategic partner with the organizer ESL and is therefore present on large screens and in arenas at major events such as ESL One “We firmly believe that this [...] involvement will complement our existing sports sponsoring activities with an eye on the future and that it will allow us to make contact with a very interesting Vice President Marketing Mercedes-Benz Passenger Cars when announcing the cooperation There are also other global players in the market BMW presents itself as partner of League of Legends in Paris.Image credit:Markus SebekUhlsport: Don’t Lose Access to the Young Target GroupBut smaller companies have also discovered eSports for themselves The sporting goods manufacturer Uhlsport is the official outfitter of the Berlin-based clan BIG (Counter-Strike) “It’s important to Uhlsport that we don’t lose our access to the young target group and that we position our brand emotionally this is becoming increasingly difficult in soccer,” the manufacturer said explaining the reasons for its involvement Warsteiner concluded a sponsoring agreement with ESL until 2020 the right to sell Warsteiner products and integration into the live broadcasts of ESL formats and tournaments “Here we have the opportunity to inspire a digital target group and present our brand in a new environment,” says Brand Director Marcus Wendel of the Warsteiner brewery has its eyeballs on the young target group the needs of young adults are very close to our hearts We want to be open to the interests of the next generation and enter into dialogue with them,” says Bernd Herweck The insurance provider has been an active eSports sponsor since 2016 as the main sponsor for the ESL Championships the highest league in Germany.  Wüstenrot is focused on banner advertising there advertisers and sponsors also need to consider a few fundamental characteristics despite all their fascination in the market Anyone visiting the master houses in Dessau today, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, can experience a Modernist ensemble planned by Walter Gropius and built in 1926 The ensemble of the Masters' Houses is an outstanding architectural achievement of the Bauhaus The cubic buildings document the aspiration for typification of the building by using identical elements paired with the highest architectural quality Archive METALOCUS-Classics Finovate is part of the Informa Connect Division of Informa PLC This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place banking & financial services innovations since 1994 Courtesy of a five-year extension of its partnership with Red Zebra Analytics cash-back offers are coming to customers of Germany’s Wüstenrot Bank with highly targeted rewards based on spending patterns,” explained Red Zebra Analytics CEO Attul Sehgal.  Demo Videos Podcast Archives Demo your latest fintech product or innovation in front of 1000+ decision makers including 600+ from banks and investors A movement tries to save an endangered architectural species •   •   • I fell in love with buildings that look like what the word “brutalist” sounds like—hulking minimally adorned—on a visit to London’s Southbank Centre This Thames-side area contains such behemoths as the Hayward Gallery and Queen Elizabeth Hall structures that exemplify an architectural style prevalent in the 1950s through the mid-1970s one that was favored by governments and universities but widely reviled by the public at large Simply pick up your smartphone to surf a virtual sea of concrete contentment: The Brutalism Appreciation Society along with the terrifically successful Tumblr Fuck Yeah Brutalism many of these buildings are in imminent peril #SOSBrutalism sought to draw awareness to the fact that these formerly derided now-fashionable buildings are not registering on the radar of traditional architectural preservationists even though many are in danger of being razed the somewhat opaque organization (a collaboration between the Deutsches Architekturmuseum and the Wüstenrot Foundation and Peter Cachola Schmal) has collected over one thousand edifices they’ve identified from nearly every continent Taking the venture into the analogue realm SOS Brutalism’s organizers have edited and published a book to showcase 120 significant projects with six geographic regions given slightly lengthier treatment in the form of case studies presents the same edifices in a gallery context with the bonus addition of large-scale models) The image people typically conjure when hearing the word “brutal” in an architectural context is a precast exposed concrete structure in which the imprints of the wooden formwork used in the fabrication process are intentionally left to linger on the material’s surface The result resembles a three-dimensional version of a monochromatic painting by Gerhard Richter—all orthogonal planks Some of the most iconic buildings considered “brutalist,” though are made not of concrete but of brick or stone a point SOS Brutalism notes in its somewhat loose definition of the category: “Brutalist buildings are not always made of concrete But they are always ‘rhetorical’ in that they blatantly place the focus on their material or sculptural form.”  The SOS Brutalism project bores through the substrate of late modernism to reveal an architectural classification while adopting a technique similar to Hitchcock and Johnson’s 1932 International Style exhibition and catalogue by establishing some fundamental aesthetic criteria (rough skins ashen surfaces) to be applied taxonomically and geographically to an otherwise disparate grouping of structures The resulting collection astonishes in its sheer variety of formal and material permutations: Laorga and López Zanón’s Itsas Eskola (or Fishing and Navigating School 1966–68,); Nøstvik’s Kenyatta International Center (Nairobi 1967–73); and Kostin and Marukov’s V These are just three wildly imaginative buildings that might be visualized as otherworldly if not for their substantial gravity Despite the internationalism of this brutalist array a quick namecheck reveals that the vast majority of the projects were designed by Western architects; the accompanying short texts try to make meaningful connections to vernacular styles but it seems quite clear that the embrace of concrete in its raw form (or which may or may not be the origin of the term brutalism—a much longer conversation) has more to do with economy and availability of materials than with the creation of an architectural movement I remain unconvinced that there is any kind of uniform logic across the brutalist spectrum as proposed by SOS Brutalism though the impressive (and massive) array of contributors to the book (I count 124!) have provided a huge amount of formal and historical analysis with much more available on the project’s aforementioned website I will share that a decade ago I wrote my PhD thesis on the New Brutalism British architects Alison and Peter Smithson preferred to write it as a proper noun when they conceived of the idea in 1953 intending to initiate a shift in architectural and urban planning priorities in the wake of WWII’s devastations My scholarly intent was to reinvestigate the Smithsons’ stated goal for the New Brutalism to be understood as an architectural ethic Resuscitating the modernist architectural legacy of the 1920s—all sleek white walls and vast expanses of fenestration—seemed to the Smithsons a tone-deaf solution for rebuilding after World War II given its large-scale destruction and human rights abuses the Smithsons argued for an architecture of authentic (as opposed to “rhetorical”) experience and an “honest” use of materials While their practice stayed primarily theoretical as members of the interdisciplinary Team 10 collective the Smithsons helped to shift architectural priorities away from material preoccupations toward a more socially aware conception of the built environment and urban design that placed ethical matters (of site This change (and my examination of it) merits a brief mention in the SOS Brutalism book before being packed away as irrelevant to its project (and in doing so allows me the singular pleasure of witnessing my entire dissertation be literally reduced to a footnote Theirs is not this old man’s New Brutalism SOS Brutalism’s purpose seems primarily a social media–fueled celebration of this long-maligned architectural trend motivated by the binding logic of the SOS Brutalism project’s aesthetic priorities (absent any shared ideological program) and its desire to see these increasingly beloved structures endure in perpetuity; in Elser’s words: “SOS Brutalism attempts to rechannel the energy from the internet’s filter bubbles to the very spot where bulldozers and demolition balls are waiting to destroy the next concrete monster.” The publication itself is gorgeous and was deliberately inspired by the critic Reyner Banham’s controversial 1966 overview entitled The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? Park Books nostalgically evokes the typeface (though substituting a newish font called Replica for the original Helvetica variant) and paper stock and filled out the package with an additional paperbound volume of essays from a 2012 symposium on the topic held in Berlin Brutalism has become a fad and fascination for design nerds and SOS Brutalism: A Global Survey does not disappoint but the pleasures of the book are more sensory than intellectual Noah Chasin writes on the intersection of human rights and the built environment in twenty-first-century urbanization. He teaches the history and theory of Urban Design at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated faculty at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and at the New School. He is executive editor at The Drawing Center. International Banker recently welcomed Tomas Spurný, Chief Executive Officer of MONETA Money Bank, to provide an update on the bank’s success in weathering the pandemic and what he predicts the future will hold for MONETA and its customers. Mr. Spurný, thank you for your time today….  MONETA recorded an operating profit of CZK 9.4 billion in the nine months to the end of September 2020, along with a 19.4-percent year-on-year increase in operating income. To what main factors do you attribute such a robust performance, especially in the face of the challenging conditions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic? Last year saw MONETA complete the acquisition of insurance company Wüstenrot. What is the main reason that you made this acquisition in the first place? Is bancassurance a business area the bank may pursue in the future as a result of this acquisition? MONETA has provided a moratorium on many billion CZKs’ worth of loan repayments. Although the bank’s asset quality remains solid as outlined in the third-quarter results, how concerned are you about a substantial decline in quality transpiring once the moratorium expires? Do you expect to see a major uptick in the bank’s nonperforming-loan ratio at any point, for instance? MONETA Money Bank “Smart Building” Headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic. What do you consider to be the single biggest challenge the bank has faced since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic? And how has the bank attempted to overcome this challenge? MONETA Money Bank conducts COVID-19 routine testing at the bank headquarters in Prague every Thursday. The cost is fully covered by the bank. As stated in the bank’s third-quarter report, the continued and highly unpredictable situation of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the Czech economy have forced MONETA to suspend dividend payments and retain its 2019 net profit. Is this suspension still in place, and roughly when do you anticipate it might be lifted and dividend payments resumed? This decision is not up to us but our regulator, the Czech National Bank. As soon as CNB permits Czech banks to resume their dividend policies, we are prepared to pay our shareholders their share of 80 percent of the bank’s annual net profit. Many banks around the world have undertaken a formal digital-transformation strategy in recent years, including MONETA. What do you consider to be the most significant way MONETA’s digital strategy is more advanced than that of its peers within the Czech banking sector? MONETA Headquarters Rooftop Terrace in Prague – an inspiring environment that gives rise to innovative ideas. How has the bank restructured workforce logistics during COVID-19? Do you have a significantly higher number of employees working from home, for example? And what measures has the bank taken to ensure the impact on business continuity is minimised as much as possible? How do you see the Czech banking sector changing over the next few years? Do you anticipate a more competitive landscape for MONETA during this time? That sounds as if it is achievable for such an enterprising bank. Thank you again, Mr. Spurný, for speaking with us today. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Caroline D. Pham — Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Scott O’Malia — International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) Marco Annunziata — Annunziata + Desai Advisors Ken Simonson — Associated General Contractors of America William C. Handorf — George Washington University School of Business Salvatore Cantale — International Institute for Management Development Peter Nathanial — International Institute for Management Development Xu Hu — Chinese Academy of Financial Inclusion (CAFI) Rafael Amiel — S&P Global Market Intelligence Maria Paula Bertran — University of São Paulo Alejandro Duran-Carrete — Alejandro Duran-Carrete Lucas Lopes de Freitas — University of São Paulo Rodrigo Caputo — Universidad de Santiago de Chile Constantin Gurdgiev — University of Northern Colorado Miguel Moreno Tripp — EGADE Business School Josep Renau's salvaged 30m-long mosaic being reinstalled in Erfurt Thomas Wolf / Wüstenrot Foundation A large Communist-era wall mosaic comprising 70,000 glass fragments has returned to a square in the city of Erfurt after years in storage. Its reinstallation signals the beginning of a shift in attitudes toward East German public art, which has struggled for years to overcome entrenched perceptions that it is ideologically unsound, historically unimportant and eminently disposable. The official inauguration of the eye-catching mosaic, Josep Renau’s Man’s Relationship to Nature and Technology (1980-84), is to be celebrated on 3 December. The street party, with bratwurst and glühwein for the local residents, will be the crowning moment of a four-year operation costing €800,000. Its message is not overtly political, which may have been a factor in its survival, says Oliver Sukrow, an expert in East German art who has conducted extensive research into the mosaic. “A lot of buildings have been torn down in the last three decades, and usually the art has gone with them,” Sukrow says. Among the many murals that have vanished is another work by Renau with a more pointed political message that once adorned a canteen in Halle-Neustadt, he says. “In the 1990s, the value of the art was not understood; people didn’t consider the quality and looked at it through an ideological lens.” The Erfurt leisure centre whose facade the mosaic originally covered became a shopping centre after the fall of the wall. In a district of the city characterised by the featureless concrete high-rise blocks favoured by East German planners, it slipped into a slow decline. An investor stepped in to buy the building, planning to pull it down and construct a new mall on the site. Under pressure from local activists and students of Renau, the mosaic was placed under heritage protection, sawn from the wall and stored in a container in 2009, and the building was demolished in 2013. It remained in a depot until the Stuttgart-based Wüstenrot Foundation, owned by a financial services company, stepped in with funding to restore it. The foundation specialises in projects related to art and architecture that is underappreciated–recent examples include a campaign to save Brutalist buildings around the world. “We find it more exciting to work on things that are undiscovered,” says Philipp Kurz, the managing director of the Wüstenrot Foundation. For Kurz, one of the most fascinating aspects of the project has been investigating the biography of Renau, whose work is more highly valued in his native Spain than in Germany. Born in Valencia in 1907, he was a culture official in the Republican government responsible for overseeing the famous Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937, where Picasso’s Guernica was first shown. Forced to flee Spain after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War, Renau lived in exile in Mexico. There he met important exponents of Mexican muralism, including David Alfaro Siqueiros By the time Renau moved to East Germany in 1958, the appetite for such art had diminished somewhat. The Erfurt mosaic, the most important of his commissions, was completed in 1984, after his death. The new shopping mall where the work has been reinstalled is lower and smaller than the original building, so the mosaic had to be mounted on a specially made concrete structure about a metre in front of the façade. But Tobias Knoblich, the Erfurt city official in charge of culture, has no doubt that the expense and toil have been worthwhile. “People liked the mosaic,” he says. “It was a part of the local identity. So much was lost after the fall of the wall in terms of cultural infrastructure that districts like this became quite lifeless. People feel thankful that the positive aspects of East Germany are slowly being acknowledged.” The Erfurt project is “important, and above all, pioneering,” says Martin Maleschka, an architect from the eastern German city of Cottbus. He has documented dozens of threatened East German murals, mosaics and other architectural art of the era in photographs and published them in a book. Among those in danger, he says, are a mural by Ronald Paris in Rostock that has almost faded away and a ceramic work by Carl-Heinz Westenburger on a swimming pool in Oberwiesenthal. “There is a new generation that grew up far from the ideology of the German Democratic Republic and values the art and architecture of GDR Modernism for its quality and craftsmanship,” says Maleschka, who was seven when the country ceased to exist. “I hope very much that more works in eastern German public spaces will be rescued.” Acting on Maleschka’s advice, the Wüstenrot Foundation has made a commitment to save at least one more: an abstract mural by Karl-Heinz Adler and Friedrich Kracht in the foyer of the town hall in Plauen. The foundation remains open to further similar projects, Kurz says. news31 May 2019Exhibition resurrects East Germany's demolished Palast der RepublikKunsthalle Rostock remembers Berlin's asbestos-riddled parliament building and culture hub Housing has grown out of reach for many people in the Czech Republic One-eighth of Czechs live in multi-generational houses and almost half of them say it is because they cannot reach their own housing according to a recent survey by mortgage bank Wüstenrot Housing prices in the Czech Republic have been rising faster than the EU average In the third quarter of 2019 housing prices were up 8.6% compared to the same time in the previous year Only Latvia saw a larger increase than the Czech Republic Housing in the Czech Republic in Q3 2019 was 43.3% more expensive than in the 2015 while in the EU27 it rose 21.0% in the same time It isn’t always the younger generation that lives with an older one 13% of Czechs share housing with family members of another generation More than one-fifth of the inhabitants of multi-generation houses share a household with two generations distant relatives such as grandchildren or grandparents “People resort to housing with relatives both for solidarity between generations and for addressing current and long-term housing needs The indisputable advantage of this arrangement is the proximity to the family and the advantageous distribution of housing costs which can result in the inhabitants saving hundreds of thousands of crowns per year,” Jiří Procházka product manager of the Wüstenrot financial group mainly because they cannot afford their own housing and 20% cannot find a suitable apartment or house to buy regardless of finance The lack of schools or other necessities in the area where people want to live was given as a reason by 17% Despite the fact that the majority of multi-generational cohabitation is a necessity 70% of such residents say that they will live permanently with relatives Czech families also help each other through shared housing family members advise and discuss matters around the house (45%) or use common family savings (18%) to cover housing costs Only 16% of respondents say that family members living with them do not help at all “Czechs are especially willing to help with counseling or physical work in adjusting or renovating the house But they don’t touch their own pockets so often Guaranteeing a loan and paying the cost of housing to another family member is an exception in the Czech Republic,” Procházka said The Housing and Finance Survey was conducted for Wüstenrot by the independent research agency Ipsos Data was collected online in November and December 2019 and with 1,000 respondents aged 18-99 and normalized for gender The rise in housing prices has been linked to a lack of new supply on the market, as well as many flats in cities being taken up for short-term rentals for tourists. Developers blame the high amount of red tape needed to get building permits for the slow addition of new housing stock Your morning coffee deserves a great companion. Why not enjoy it with our daily newsletter? News from Czechia, curated insights, and inspiring stories in English. ^cover: Refurbishment and restoration of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Solar Pavilion (1959-1962) and website in this browser for the next time I comment Abitare.it e Style.corriere.it rifiutando tutti i cookie di profilazione ad eccezione di quelli tecnici necessari Naviga il sito di Abitare.it con pubblicità profilata e senza abbonarti By subscribing you will reject all but technical cookies on Iodonna.it By clicking "accept" you will allow to process your personal data by us and third parties and be able to browse Abitare.it website without a subscription “It’s a safe alternative for a regular saving account”Markus Stegmann Commercial director BGL BNP Paribas BGL BNP Paribas “The purpose of a home purchase savings plan is to enable a subscriber to receive a loan on favourable terms for the financing of their personal home, in exchange for the payment of contributions,” according to the government’s Guichet.lu information portal “Their purpose is the financing [of] a main residence.” savers need to sign a ten-year contract fixing the amount they will contribute to the plan each month If the account is closed before the ten years is up or if the savings are spent on unauthorised expenses in most cases “the contributions lose their deductible character and a corrective tax to the disadvantage” of the taxpayer is imposed (Punitive taxation does not apply in cases of death and permanent disability.) “This corrective taxation is applied” retrospectively to all previous tax years that the saver wrote off the plan There are only three financial institutions in Luxembourg authorised to offer the home savings scheme (see below) many retail lenders resell the product to their clients “This product combines a saving scheme for the first period of the contract and a fixed interest rate loan defined at the time of the signature of the contract,” states Markus Stegmann which resells the Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall plan “The client has a long-term visibility on his future home project combined with an interesting fiscal advantage.” “The home savings scheme is used to build up capital that can be used to buy build or renovate a house or flat you live in or are going to live in,” a spokeswoman for Banque Raiffeisen which also resells Bausparkasse Schwäbisch Hall accounts the savings can be used to purchase land to build a home refinance a personal home loan and for home repairs Bankers say the home savings scheme is popular with their customers “Our clients see this product as an interesting fiscal optimisation tool to invest in future home projects,” says Stegmann He reckons the scheme is a good option for two different types of savers “The first target is clients who want to start saving for their future home They benefit today from an interesting saving interest rate and a predetermined fixed interest rate It’s a safe alternative for a regular saving account as long as the client can benefit from the fiscal advantages,” he notes “The second group are those who are requesting a home loan today from their bank The bank can structure the home loan by embedding a home-saving scheme in their contract in order to benefit from further fiscal advantages.” “The deposits made on this account can be deducted from taxable income up to a maximum threshold,” according to the Banque Raiffeisen spokeswoman Taxpayers aged 18 to 41 can write off €1,344; the figure is €672 for those 42 and older The same amount can be deducted for “jointly taxable spouses or partners” and “each child for which the taxpayer obtains a tax reduction for children.” Taxpayers should list the amount in the special expenses (dépenses spéciales or DS) section on their annual tax declarations so check with a financial professional to be sure that you understand how the scheme works Contributions to and interest income from 3 authorised home savings schemes can be tax deductible: Home purchase savings plans are not the same thing as the type of savings accounts called “plans d’épargne-logement” (PEL) that are offered in other European countries PEL savings are not tax deductible in Luxembourg