A Busy Day

My first week of the semester is, in theory, done.  With no class on Friday, I am content to welcome some beautiful weather (promised for the next few days, I am a bit skeptical) and get the weekend started.  Sorry that I did not write yesterday, though take that as an indication as I am doing what I came down here to do – stay busy, not just write about things!

Yesterday started as a rather glum day.  I trudged to studio at 8:40 in the driving rain, which had been going all night and wrought havoc on the city’s bus system.  Because of this, at 9:00, only about 1/3 of the students and professors had made it to the architecture school for studio.  We didn’t end up commencing until 9:30, and got a lectured introduction to the project for the semester and the topic of the studio: Urban Design Studio – Interior Urbanisms.  After the intro we took a quick recess (for those of you on Facebook you saw my comment about how I don’t understand how they actually accomplish much down here for the amount of breaks they take) and reconvened to hear from each of the studio professors about their personal thoughts before selecting who we would work with for the semester.  It’s amazing how similar the personalities of the professors align with many at Tulane.  I suppose an architect is an architect :P

The process was cumbersome, more so than the one at Tulane, but eventually we all wrote down our preferences and then were ushered out to the site for the semester during a brief reprieve from the rain.

The site for the semester is the Australian Technology Park (ATP), located a 20 minute walk from the Uni.  It is across the massive railroad gulch from my terrace and Eveleigh Markets, and was originally part of the massive rail car works where locomotives and carriages were built between the 1880s and 1989. Part of the same compound as the Eveleigh Market and large Carriageworks development I stumbled upon last week, after the railyard closed the ATP site was decided to be a center for technological development in Sydney.  Many of the expansive buildings which housed state of the art rail technology when they were first opened were converted to state of the art offices for tech startups as well as well-established companies.

One of the preserved cranes in the converted train shed at ATP.

It is an interesting place, and the heritage buildings add a lot of character, but in general the planning (and few new buildings which have been added in the last two decades) are pretty terrible. The project for the semester will be to develop one of the sites within the ATP to help mitigate some of the existing issues.

Inside the main heritage shed at ATP.

Anyways, as soon as we got to the site to tour the skies opened up and we ended up getting pretty wet as we explored, and no one was in a good mood to be doing site work.  We took a long break for lunch and I returned home to eat before regrouping at the architecture school to finish out the day.  At 2:30 we met in studio and were told our groups for the semester (I got my first choice, a guy who is keen to focus on the relationship of public and private space and the interplay that exists architecturally), and we settled in for a bit of a chat about assignments.  There are 16 of us in my studio group, and all of them are first or (mostly) second year masters students, and a majority of them went to Sydney Uni for their undergrad.  As such, they were a bit clique-y, but given some more time I’m sure I will make some friends.

After studio I rushed back home to meet up with Tiffany and we caught a bus to Town Hall for a gala hosted by the Lord Mayor Clover Moore.  It was not too crowded when we arrived, and we got to enjoy some good food and an open bar – nice to know my GST (tax) is going to something useful…  Tiffany and I had a great time and we met up with a friend of hers, Max, to carry on the evening.  After we had satiated our hunger and more than slaked our thirst, we struck out across Hyde Park to go to trivia night with some of Max’s coworkers at the Strand Hotel.  We won round one, but slipped in the second, coming up with a respectable 4^th place and, from what it seems, $10 to dispose of at the place next week.

Inside Centennial Hall at Town Hall.

We made an early night of it and all walked back to my place via Central and I was in bed by midnight – a productive, busy day no doubt! Today I am still debating my course of action.  I will either head out to the site or trek toward North Sydney to pick up where I left off on Wednesday.  Tonight our next door neighbor invited us over, and I can safely say we are all looking forward to finally meeting some of the other residents of our block!