1 more!

What I mean is *only* one more to go! my exams, that is..

Been doing a spate of cooking this weekend. Cooked:
-curry
-chinese-style beef
-lotsa vege
-red bean dessert
=)

All the above foodstuff meant to feed me thru the next two days. The red bean took a lot of time but it was entirely worth it due to today's (in fact, the past week) non-stop rain and more rain. Thats what we currently have in common with KL now. Aahhh the happiness a simple bowl of warm red bean soup can give during a rainy day.. should have taken a pic of how happpy my housemate and me were..easily contented people we are..

My sleeping habits have turned lopsided over here. The weather, dreary as it is, forms perfect excuses for one to snuggle in under a warm quilt and just forget about the day. Under the cozy quilt, life seems so much simpler. All I see when I gaze out of my >6 feet high windows is part of a tree, and the biggg blue (mostly gray) sky. I simply love the skies (not only the ones in Melb, also back in KL)..

Fell asleep at dawn today clutching this book - Twentieth-Century Architecture by Dennis P. Doordan.

The book is divided into 3 sections:

• "Confronting Modernity" which surveys four discrete domains of professional design activity in the period 1900-1940: urban architecture, domestic architecture, the architecture of industry and transportation, and political architecture.
• "Modernist Hegemony" which review developments during the period 1940-1965.
• "An era of pluralism" covers 1965-2000. It calls into question the spectrum of modernism and reviews the spectrum of design movements.

Instead of using biographies of great designers, or the programs of significant artistic movements, this author uses an unconventional approach. He reviews "critical sets" of buildings to tell its story, consisting of 3 or more projects that demonstrate a range of responses to a common design issue.

The author included an excerpt from All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, where cultural historian Marshall Berman characterized modern life as filled with paradoxical relationships between disparate facets of experience:

"To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment which promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world -- and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern experiences and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, "all that is solid melts into air."

Also in the introduction by Doordan - "By its very nature, architecture serves as a manifestation of the factors that shape the modern experience. Architecture begins as a process of design that gives form to a wide range of aesthetic and cultural issues, and concludes as a process of construction intimately connected with economic and material concerns. The study of architectural history, therefore, offers a unique opportunity to gauge the relationships among the cultural, economic and political dimensions of modernity."

... to be continued...