I wasn't able to post an entry yesterday from the holiday shack. In the morning the dial-up-internet kept dropping out every few minutes. Frustrated I went and painted the master bedroom in the holiday shack. I returned about 2.00 pm only to discover the local server was down. I kept on checking until about midnight. It was still down. So I gave up in disgust and went to bed.

Things were back to normal about 6.30am this morning.

On the South Coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula, south of Adelaide, I'm on the cusp of civilization and wilderness. After the days painting I walked the dogs along the cusp this afternoon. I sat on the cliff tops in the last rays of the sun. I could sense summer approaching.

I looked across the southern ocean and imagined the Antarctic just over the horizon:
Even there, in the large tract of wilderness, the effects of human activity could be discerned.

The ice shelves were breaking up from global warming. The Larsen B shelf on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula has fragmented into small icebergs.

The region has experienced a 2.5-degree-Celsius rise in average temperatures -an increase greater than for any location in the Southern Hemisphere.

Then I thought about civilization. About the modern architecture of the city, my mode of live in a post industrial city and my desire for a new kind of regional green architecture based on eco-dwelling. That desire creates a dissonance with, and a rupture from the harmonious view of modernity that pervades Australia.

The harmonious view denies the contradictions, dissonances and tensions of modernity due to politics, economics and culture all being united by progress. Progress is seen to harmonious and continuous. It is built into the very architecture of the modernist office tower: their glassy facades reflect the mirror of linear progress in the metropolis. It is a mode of modern life that is rootless, transitory and fragmented.

And then I thought of the new apartments that are being built in the inner city. They function to shield the home from the outside world of money and finance. The outard walls form a mask. The home represents dwelling that is based on familarity, intimacy, personal history and memories. A radical disjunction btween public and private, exterior and interior.

Of course, many of those living in the apartments have their interiors decorated by professional desigers who freeze an outward show of fashion. This stylish freeeze obliterates the last traces of dwelling robbing the interior of individuality and life. Life really does become rootless and fragmented.

It is the coffee shops on the streets of the metropolis where we seek to relate the fragments of the old connections that have been sundered.

Along the south coast the rigid private public of the private dwelling so favoured by Alfred Loos is eased. The links between exterior and interior provided by decks and courtyardsas can seen from this photo by J. Meyerowitz, from his Cape Light book.

The beach shack breaks with the modernist conception of the house as a refuge from the outside world.

The bredroom is painted pale gray/blue and white cap white to link the light filled inside to the sky and sea outside. Space and time are linked by the movement of light.

The beach shack discloses another mode of dwelling. A more poetic one: one that is between earth and sky, between nature and civilization.