A busy week: We did the London thing, Clare & I, and the Luis Barragan exhibition was cool, and it was interesting to see how a 'modern' architect worked outside Europe and, to a lesser extent, America. Many of the rough edges of modernist architecture in Europe aren't there in Barragan's work, but the interesting bits are, as is a knowledge and love of local building traditions and an awareness of the environment around a building — Barragan considered the garden to be an intrinsic part of a house, for example. His use of form and colour could be quite wonderful.
There was also lots of working and that kind of thing, plus my graduation ceremony was yesterday — lots of standing around wearing full academic dress: gown, hood and mortar board. It was quite nice to parade around looking vaguely important for a while, but it was hot and humid and not all that pleasant really. Mum and Dad came down to do the Mum and Dad at graduation thing, we (the typo graduates) rounded up as many of our number as we could and did the throwing hats in the air thing, and then Mum, Dad, Clare and I went for a meal afterwards, and after that we sat around for a while talking and it was really nice. Early birthday present from parents — a nice box with Mac OS X in it, which is about to be installed... I'll probably write more about the graduation/work weirdness later, and amusingly the Design Museum (where the Barragan exhibition was) has really badly designed sinks in the toilets, where it's practically impossible to get your hands under the taps to wash them... you'd have thought that they'd have thought of that...