Skip to main content

Jan. 21-23

Friday, Jan. 23rd

On Wednesday the 21st I had one new class: Late Antique/Early Byzantine Art and Architecture with Professor Jan Gadeyne. I really enjoyed it--I think this will be my favorite class. My advisor at Duke recommended him, and I can see why now! He has a very entertaining lecture style and a great accent (he's Belgian). I also bought my textbooks.

Thursday morning with Professor Gadeyne we went to two museums: the Palazzo Massimo and the Palazzo Altemps. We met up first at the Piazza Repubblica, pictured below. In the museums we looked at classical Roman sculpture and some Late Antique sarcophagi to see the difference between them, and how Late Antique art grew out of changing social/political conditions in the late Roman world; this will be the theme of the class.



Today, Friday, we went grocery shopping and did laundry (we don't have classes on Friday) and this afternoon visited La Sapienza, the main campus of the University of Rome. The University of Rome has 250,000 students (!), however, only about 40% of each class of incoming students actually graduates with a degree. The theoretical track is 3 years of undergraduate plus 2 years of master's degree-level courses (primo grado and secondo grado), but most students take much longer, sometimes 10 years or more to finish their secondo grado. The current university buildings were constructed under Mussolini and definitely look like it. The statue is of La Sapienza, apparently a Greek goddess of wisdom/knowledge.



Tonight we experimented with cooking: I made pan-fried chicken, honey-glazed carrots, and rosemary-garlic potatoes in the oven. Then we made a chocolate cake from a box. The dinner came out great, although I managed to burn the one oven pan we have. The cake we had to make in the same pan, which was far too large for it, causing us to burn the top of the cake. It was also kind of dry. But everyone who came in our room said it smelled delicious, and it tasted pretty good for kinda-burnt-cake-in-a-big-roasting-pan. Hurrah! Cooking here in milligrams and Celsius and gas-burning stoves has been very challenging, but entertaining!

Comments

  1. (Test run comment:)Your cooking endeavors sound very impressive (as does pretty much everything else you mentioned -- with the possible exception of laundry).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s.  Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion.  In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects.  Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali

A Voter's Guide: Local Elections 2016

I spent a long time researching different local races and some of the ballot measures here in Santa Clara County.  In case you're on the fence or want some further information to guide your voting, I've compiled my thoughts here. Selection Methodology I have three tiers for selecting  candidates. 1. Alignment on Issues:  I will choose the candidate who is most closely aligned with me on the issues I think are important. 2. Experience and Education:  All other things being equal, I will choose the candidate who has the most knowledge of what is required for the position, either through education, previous experience, or active participation in similar positions. 3. Women and Minorities:  All other things being equal (#1 and #2 above), I will choose candidates who are women or minorities in order to increase the diversity of voices of our elected officials.  It's my own personal form of affirmative action. The Issues We're fortunate enough to live in a place

Housing Affordability in the Bay Area: An Architectural Perspective

The Bay Area's housing crisis has gained a status akin to the weather: We can't help but mention it whenever two or more Bay Area residents are gathered together, and we feel there's equally nothing we can do to change it.  But instead of the general praise given to the area's weather, there is general despair about the state of housing.  At least among the twenty-something set and construction industry professionals who make up my peers and colleagues, there are few answers and much criticism for the way we live here.  It's not dense enough, public transportation is a sham, and housing costs are outrageous.  Many of my peers agree that they would not live here at all except that their spouse/significant other works in the tech industry, without whose salary they could not afford to live here, but whose worth is so valued here that it makes little sense economically to live elsewhere.  Here in the Peninsula it's just as bad as in San Francisco ("the city&