Into The Future: The 1st few days in Oz

Leaving from different locations across the US, our Australian cohort made the long and arduous journey across the Pacific to the exciting and backwards world "down under." Most of us arrived @ 6:00 am on Thurs. June 18th while the rest slowly trickled in until we completed our group by about 4:00 pm on Sat. June 20th. We've all been battling jet lag for the past couple of days and that's been . . . fun i suppose. I personally am still getting used to the fact that we're caught in complete darkness by 5:00 pm every day; trippy. My body seems to feel that I should get tired when the sun sets here, and so I was ready to pass out after consuming a couple plates of sushi with Jul, Gretchen, and Dannielle. However, Jul, having been in Melbourne, Australia for the past 3 months, has not fallen victim to the jet lag that plagues the rest of us and so she inspired Gretchen and I to accompany her to a local bar for a drink that ended up being an expensive method of passing time before we retired to our hostel thoroughly tired and unsatisfied.

As I realize I have just skipped over most of what happened in the past 3 days I've been here, I will try to sum that up in a concise, yet entertaining manner. On Thursday, without having a clear grasp on our bearings, the 8 of us that arrived together set off to explore our immediate surroundings. Luckily, we happened upon Sydney University and it's beautiful campus complete with an array of striking buildings. Upon inquiry, I was made aware that the lecture that our professors, Michael Zaretsky and Adrian Parr, had planned for us to attend later that night was in fact an hour earlier than we had previously been informed. Of course, this hardly even mattered once we arrived at the lecture since most of us promptly fell into a deep slumber thanks to our jet lag.

Friday began with a number of us waking early due once again to jet lag and then finding ourselves listening to presentations by a group of 2nd and 3rd year architecture students from Sydney U. The ties between cultural and climatic demands for architecture have been brought up again and again in the past few days, which leads me to believe that such practices will be central to our studies here. Of course this was told to us before we arrived, but seeing it enforced through actions helps it sink in.

Saturday we took the train to Redfern station to meet Michael and two of Adrian's architect friends for a walking tour of the area. Terrace housing dominates the residential neighborhoods and a massive rail yard is undergoing steps to revitalize and reuse its workshops. In particular, we had the opportunity to peruse a local market of organic, locally grown and produced food, which was situated adjacent to a repurposed rail structure now called Carriageworks. This building had an exquisite interaction between new concrete volumes inside an existing steel structure with precision detailing to afford a exceptionally clean reading of the tectonics and architectural relationships between the new and old.

This brings us to Sunday for which we have no structured curriculum and to which we will all most likely be catching up on several readings required of us for our courses . . . Yay!