Current mood:	calm
Current music:	the way we were - default

On Readings
Its amazing what a semestral break can do- I get to organize all my stuff back again, throw those piles of unwanted paper, clean up the bedroom, update my webspaces and upload files for sharing. But most of all, I-CAN-READ-A-BOOK-AGAIN. Oh how I miss my books.

To start my book reading chronicles, I took some time last night on re-reading the script of Oren Safdie's wonderful architectural play called Private Jokes, Public Spaces...(isn't that a wonder, an architectural play...such a rarity!) Anyway, I'd love to share some lines from that play- the one that really cracks me up everytime I read it. And its quite timely to be posting these lines since I just saw earlier my LA 1 grade. (Landscape Architecture 1...that Super GE, as they say) Fuck that grade! Now I know why I should hate Landscape Architecture even MORE! Here's to that subject. Here, read it if youre that interested. Text edited for fast reading

William: (pointing to the drawing) This thing here, right on the edge of the swimming area...looks like a...lamppost?

Margaret: That's a tree.

William: Landscaping!

Margaret: No. That tree presently exists on the Northeast side of the property. A large Maple. Quite healthy.

William: Wouldn't you have more flexibility if you removed the tree?

Margaret: Old trees can't be moved...I see nature as much part of the architecture as the building itself...

Colin: (getting up, putting his jacket to leave) Okay, I've heard enough...Let the environmentalists worry about that damn tree, Margaret. This is an urban site. Next thing you know, you'll want to preserve the rats. If architects had to worry about every weed, where would people live? Where would we work? Where would we die?

Margaret: Weeds are different, they kill trees.

Colin: Weeds kill to survive!

Erhardt: Colin...please sit down...Allow me, please...

Colin: (to Erhardt) I mean, she cannot go around doing whatever she likes and think that there are no consequences-

Erhardt: Colin, please. (pauses) Margaret, this is the point we've been trying to make. Herein lies the most dfficult barriers for you, the insurgent architect, to overcome. In facing up to a world of uncertainty and risk, the possibility of being quite undone by the consequences of our own actions weighs heavily upon us, often make us prefer "those ills we have than flying to others that we know not of".

Margaret: I don't see how-

Erhardt: And it is perhaps no accident that architecture as a supremely speculative and heroic profession- rather than as either a platonic metaphor or craft- emerged in Italy along with the merchant capitalists who began upon their globalizing ventures through commercial speculations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Margaret: So how does this relate to my project?

Colin: FUCK THE TREE! All right? Take that tree and cut it up into firewood! We'r e not butterflies, we're not grasshoppers, we're living, breathing, human beings!


...LOL!!!

Next up...heto, kamusta naman talaga!

TASCHEN’s new architecture series brings a unique perspective to world architecture, highlighting architectural trends by country. Each book features 15 to 20 architects—from the firmly established to the up-and-coming—with the focus on how they have contributed to very recent architecture in the chosen nation. Crossing the globe from country to country, this new series celebrates the richly hued architectural personality of each nation featured.

...and here's the catch, a book costs USD25! mehn...come over here, you damn books!

In the meantime, semestral break is for Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. So far so good, what can I say?! Amazing read though a bit predictable. I can't help but compare the plot somehow with Memoirs of a Geisha. Only that they differ in context.

Anyways, thats all for now. Will be busy in the next few days.