Enter Brisvegas

Another state, another city, a chance to see another side of Australia. Now I had heard that Queenslanders were ‘mad as snakes’ but I didn’t really get that impression at all. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even found that many flaws if locals didn’t point them out to me. Of course there are a number of obvious maladies inherent to the river city, but then Sydney and Melbourne are not without their trip-ups as well.

The world expo visited Brisbane in 1988, my birth year, and as far as history is concerned, it was one of the best things to ever happen to the city. No given, I had no clue that this ever took place until someone in Brisbane enlightened me, but obviously somebody was paying attention because it brought visitors from all over the world to the state capitol of Queensland. The city blossomed and development followed in its wake. However, one negative souvenir it left the city with was a giant phallic structure that lights up every night with a Technicolor collar and a set of four searchlights that continuously scan the night sky for God only knows. The world expo council meant this carnival monstrosity to be a gift, but in my opinion it only remains as a blemish on an otherwise beautiful cityscape. Many have tried to remove it over the years, but to no avail. The Sky Needle, as it is called, stands in all its post-modernist glory for people to cock their heads sideways at still today.

The name ‘Brisvegas’ was coined by Virgin Blue airlines as a marketing ploy a while ago, but the name stuck, and people all over Australia will refer to the city by this pet name. In a city of cheap and speedy development along with an immigration rate of about 1000 people every 2 weeks, perhaps the name is relevant. Politics is a joke and organization seems amiss, but most of these accusations are not my own. A local architect named Timothy Hill of architecture firm Donovan Hill describes his hometown in this manner. So that’s my quick and dirty on the Bris. More adventures to follow!

FOOTY!

It’s Saturday the 25^th of July and I’m going to my first ever Australian Rules Football Match! The sport of footy is near and dear to the hearts of Melbourne’s inhabitants. No other city in Australia celebrates the game as much as them. Each neighborhood has its own team and fierce rivalries are fought to decide which neighborhood will rein supreme. However, they all happen to have completely ridiculous fight songs. Just to give you a taste, take the team we were rooting for, St. Kilda. Can you guess how their fight song goes? Well if you guessed a defunct version of When The Saints Go Marching In except with “Oh how I want to be in that number” switched to “Oh how I want to be in St. Kilda” then you would be spot on. But enough about heir musical inaptitude; this is a sporting event, not a orchestral production, and thankfully the action on the pitch that follows the musical introductions more than makes up for their inadequacy.

Allow me to attempt to explain the game in a concise manner:

Start with an oval pitch a little bigger than an American Football field and place 4 tall white poles at both ends. The middle two poles of each set should be about 50% taller than the outside poles, this delineates the two types of point scoring opportunities. 6 points for a ball punted through the inner poles and 1 for a ball through the outer set. Game play rarely stops except when a major pile-up has stalled movement of the ball. Passing can be done in the form of a tossed lateral, a punched forward ball, or a punted ball. If a player catches a punted ball, no matter whose foot it came off of, this is called a mark. The player then has the option to stop and set up his next move, or continue play and forfeit this privilege. Until the player forfeits his ability set up a shot/pass by running several meters away from the point where he caught the mark, the opposing team cannot interfere with his set shot/pass.

How many people have I completely lost by now? Well the game lasts for four 20-minute quarters and ending scores generally fall into the 50 – 150 range. Simple enough right! Well you get the hang of it pretty quickly when you watch it being played. I’m a fan. I think I’ll have to get some games going back on campus when I return. Oh, and one more thing; one of the famous architects we met, Sean Godsell, used to play professional footy for St. Kilda! How cool is that! Oh . . . I sure do like this place.

Office in the Clouds

After having a city tour on Monday July 20^th, Tuesday rolls around and it’s time to visit the office I’ll be working in later this year. Excited and a bit nervous I push in through the large revolving door at the base of Melbourne Central Tower. A posh stone and stainless steel lobby welcomes us on the other side and we’re directed to take two elevators up to arrive at Design Inc’s reception area. The firm inhabits the top two floors in one of Melbourne’s tallest buildings. The space was actually deemed unleasable due to the shape created by inward slanted curtain walls. It was being used as mechanical and maintenance space before Design Inc seized the opportunity to take advantage of such prime real estate.

As you may be able to imagine due to my build up, we were greeted by an expansive view out across Melbourne once the elevator doors slid open on level 51. John MacDonald, a director of the firm, is waiting for us at the front desk and produces a smile as Michael and I shake his hand. I had organized for us to have this opportunity and I was fully engaged in making a good first impression on one of my future bosses.

John led us around the office briefly pointing out a couple of projects in the works. All the while the whole group was trying to take it all in and figure out how the hell I’d landed a position here; I was baffled myself.

We marched back upstairs from whence we had come and situated ourselves around a large conference table to be briefed on a couple of local wonders Design Inc had produced in recent years. First up was the K2 Sustainable Housing complex. An amazing public housing project that shames anything you would find in the US that fits the same category. This was followed by CH2 (Council House 2), which is an expansion for the original Council House in Melbourne. It was the first building in Oz to achieve their highest sustainability award and continues to inspire new projects to outdo it.

We had a tour of CH2 later that day and the tour guide voiced his hope that one day people will scoff at CH2 as a primitive work of sustainability. It ‘s interesting having so many of these sustainable projects funded by the government. By having the government lead the way, the move towards a sustainable future is seemingly forced onto private organizations to keep up. Our tour guide actually pointed out that many corporations had already approached them about the building so that they might incorporate the same kind of systems into their own buildings.

Such great work, and yet John was so humble about it all. That’s actually been a reoccurring theme that I’ve noticed about the Australian architects we have met. Their egos aren’t enormous ballooning behemoths! It’s quite refreshing. Unfortunately, since visiting the office and being awestruck I’ve become a bit unhappy to find that they will not be paying me as an intern but rather awarding me a small bonus at the end of my term. Money’s not everything, but I need to eat!

Time to Catch Up!

So once again I’ve gone and left a large gap in time without reporting on anything. I would try to play the card of ‘well I’ve just been busy’ but it seems such a tired and empty excuse that I’ll just cut to the chase and admit laziness. Can you really blame me though? I’ve been in a tropical paradise for the past 5 days! I’ll write more on that later; I have a lot of ground to cover before I can speak to these past 5 days.

Right so where did I leave off . . . oh right, Melbourne! What a city! I have to say, and I think the rest of the students will support this feeling, the architecture is a bit . . . well . . . striking at first. Post-modernism hit hard here and still seems to be lingering around, but I suppose that’s part of the culture of Melbourne. There’s a bit of a competition between Sydney and Melbourne to be regarded as the best city in Oz. Sydney’s got the views and the icons, Melbourne has the well developed cultural and art scene ingrained in it’s very essence.

Busing to our hostel from the airport one of the first views I was addressed with was a blinding golden cap atop the tallest building in Melbourne, Eureka Tower. Fun little fact about that: the gold cap I speak of is actually pure gold worked into the windows of the premium penthouse apartments that sell at a price higher than I will allow myself to utter. So I should have premeditated the series of bold architectural moves that lay in wait for me. The competition with Sydney may have been the cause for some of this flashy stuff since Melbourne has been attempting to create an iconic building of its own to rival the Sydney Opera House for a while now. Anyways, that should set the scene for the next couple entries to follow.

Air Traffic Control

First of all let me shed some light on my defunct state of mind in regards to travel; I don’t mean to lead one to believe that there’s anything wrong with the way in which I mentally address changes in location, but merely give a brief insight into my train of thought, or rather lack thereof in this case. I have a tendency not to perceive change until well after it has occurred; this relates directly to the manner in which I respond to travel as it fits within the realm of change, at least geographically if not also culturally. This being said, I am conscious of impending change and fully present in the moment in which said change commences.

The defunct nature to which I have previously made reference comes into play through my mental perception of change. Though I am aware of the transition, no emotions are directly tied to the alteration in my physical or situational alteration. What herein follows is a disjointed reality in which the experiences that I participate in occur in an entirely different environment to what I have come accustomed to, but my mind hasn’t quite come along for the ride. A rather otherworldly state is therefore created to compensate for my mental retardation. I’m not completely certain how much good this description does for the reader, but I hoped that it may help one embody the following events through a similar lens as I had harnessed when experiencing them.

Flight has always been an enjoyable occasion for me, even when the situation may tend to inform against such optimistic outlooks. As such, I checked in, passed through security and boarded the Boeing 737 to Melbourne in a completely relaxed state. We left the ground on time and without a single hiccup. The Australian coastline smiled back at me as I gazed upon it from my window seat and soon after the cheerful stewardesses supplied me with a delicious carrot cake accompanied by a bottle of juice. Even for those who find air travel unfavorable, this would have had to rank as a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Of course, it was too good to be true. The child sitting in the row behind us grew restless and let out a scream to wake me from my peaceful slumber that I had drifted into. Dannielle was seated beside me, directly in front of the child, and apparently her seat wished to be reclined at all times, regardless of her desires. Perhaps the chair was aware of the child’s antsy state and wished to serve as an accomplice to his experimentation in the trying our patience for the child quickly transformed the back of Dannielle’s chair into a springboard for propelling himself off of his own seat. Apparently the child was also in training to become a puppeteer as he paraded a miniature representation of Ronald McDonald across the top of Dannielle’s head.

Amazingly Dannielle had no negative reaction to the child hijacking her comfortable seat and expropriating her skull; I commend her self-restraint. This foray does not end there though; as we began to descend toward Melbourne the child, or rather annoyance filled sack of skin, found it imperative to let everyone know of the pressure differential occurring in his auditory center, or as he put it over and over again, “Mommy my ears are popping, mommy my ears are popping, etc.”

Now I realize that the subject in question is a child, actually an infant, and cannot be expected to understand issues of physics and anatomy in relation to varying dimensions of altitude, but I have never come across an individual with such an elongated period of auditory pressure equalization (ear popping). We landed, taxied to the gate, unloaded, picked up our baggage, and he was still reiterating his original statement. However, there was a brighter side to all of this as Dannielle pointed out to me; close encounters with unruly infants operate as a free and easy form of birth control for all those within earshot.

Cockatoo Island [July 9th After the Barbie]

Cockatoo Island was Australia's version of Alcatraz way back in the day, but it has also been used heavily for ship making in the past. Now, it hosts the Australian Biennale and is open to the public, but many of the structures from it's long history are still present.

Manly Beach [July 11th Before DRAG!]

This friendly fella came right up to me and asked for a piece of my bread, so I gave him some.

Sunset at Manly Lagoon