Change of tone. Huge pleasure as I opened up a 1979 copy of 'The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays' by Colin Rowe (got from Amazon from the USA for a mere $26) which arrived today. Michael R says to me 'I had dinner with him, he was outrageously drunk'. Those were the days. Clever and drunk. I flicked and pondered my way through it avoiding a 'drop in' meeting on our lift refurbishment which was apparently 'terribly important'. It felt good, remembering so much about my own architectural education (lots of clever and drunk). I'd only recently discovered my notebooks talking of Rowe on Corbusier at the very same time (1979) The language used to baffle me, but now thirty years on it just makes decent sense, the whole thing a kind of treasure. This book object, yes it is an object-more than just being a thing (for me at least) with it's foggy B&W images makes me wonder which texts my students will savour in the same way in thirty years time, because to be honest I haven't read a decent piece of architectural criticism (exception Shumon Basar) for a hell of a long time. That may be simply that I lost patience with 'the media' and got more interested in 'books'.