Two Nights in a Row! Wowzers!

I mysteriously have time to write, tonight, which fills me with dread. I feel like I should be doing something for my design studio - but I'm not.

Oh, sure, I'm researching for the enormously huge research paper (that isn't so enormously huge) that I have to write for my Modern Architectural History class, but that's pretty fun. A lot of fun, actually.

I might just chuck this whole architecture thing and go be a research assistant for someone, because I can seriously sit and read books on anything all day. And take notes, that go on nicely organized note cards with little sticky labels (pre-printed in a nice sans-serif font) in the top left corner that tell me where I got the info, the page number in the top right corner, and filed under the section of the outline to which it belongs in a nifty note card organizer that was $4 at Office Depot.

I get to combine my obsessive love of organizational tools with reading!!!!!

It's like I died and went to heaven! And heaven is a Container Store with a built-in library! And maybe a Starbucks with Tom Selleck as the barrista...

Okay, so maybe I couldn't read books about anything (I'm not too keen on string theory, nuclear reactions, and electrical engineering, so I'd restrict myself to history, the arts, and anthropology...even though the other two kind of fall under the third?).

Right now, however, I am eating up all this Le Corbusier and Soviet Russia.

See, Le Corbusier had "a thing" with Russia in the late 1920s, early 1930s, when the Soviets started to organize themselves and figure out what, exactly, the Communist state should be (an autocracy, apparently). He had one project built there, and entered a couple of other competitions, which he did not win because he was a Swiss bourgeois pig-dog.

Or something.

But his relationship with the Russian Constructivists he met shaped his future works profoundly. And it's fascinating reading about the impact Communism had on art and architecture, and how architecture was not just seen as something pretty to live in/look at, but as something that could change the nature of society. Architecture was, in and of itself, revolutionary, and I don't just mean "look: that's new" but "we can bring down governments with this building" revolutionary.

The whole idea is mind-boggling to me.

Mind-boggling and fascinating.