manta blimp

jellyfish blimp

these are so graceful

The food one is really interesting, it actually belongs to the industrial design school, and is being led by an anthropologist, so it’s focus is a lot more on the way that the systems of food distribution work rather than what they look like. I took a walk around my block, and within probably a 300m radius, I found pomegranates, tomatoes, aubergines, lemons, figs, what i think are mulberries, and something that looks like it is an apricot. I’ve still got a bit of reading to do on the plants I’m likely to find, so there may well be others that I’ve photographed, but not recognised.

The death by architecture elective is a bit less well defined, not least because I totally forgot to go to the first session, but there is a list of competitions to enter, so I think I just need to enter them!

My main design studio is one of the sial studios, so I have Mark Burry as the notional studio leader, but it seems to be run mostly by Barnaby. (who looks a bit like what I would have looked like if I had continued ageing from how I looked at 18, without any of the baldness, tiredness and stuff.)

The studio is suitably vague about almost everything, which works for me. It is, initially at least, an investigation into the antipodes, and as an alien this seems to be quite appropriate. I’m viewing the antipodes more as whatever exists beyond the limits of conventional perception, as geographically, the earth is a known quantity. I’ve got to write a bit of stuff about it, so I’ll post it up here when it’s done.

The elective that I’m teaching is going quite well. Things were hitting a bit of a wall in terms of getting some sort of response out of the students (which given that they are technically the same academic level as me, or higher, is tricky to be stropy) so I took them all down to Mr Tulk and we discussed the work over some coffee. This seemed to do the trick and the ideas started to come out.

I’m actually in the airport at the moment waiting to get a flight to Sydney to teach GC at UTS (University of Technology Sydney – I think). They have an MDA programme (master of digital architecture), it’s a terrible name, but it seems to be gaining ground as the the name for this type of course in Australia, and until someone thinks of a better name it will serve as a placeholder for it’s true meaning in much the same way that the blanket term ‘sustainability’ (spit) has covered any subject that people care to throw it at.

It’s going pretty well, and my reactive component tutorial seems to be getting quite refined now so that it hardly requires any explanation, I think one more version and it’ll be done. I made a new one yesterday about fabrication planning to allow for paper models.

It takes up a lot of time, so I need to start working in these exciting cities a bit too as well as trying to wear the bottoms off my flip flops (or thongs as the are called here)

I think I’m drinking too much coffee, or eating too little, or not drinking enough water, or a combination of all of the above, I’m super tired at the moment, but I think a fair bit of that might have to do with the huge amount of information I’m taking on, but that’s a bit of a lame excuse. I’m going to try and start a 10 day yoga going session on Tuesday, to see if that sorts me out.

I went for another cupping session yesterday, the coffees were an Australian grown MTC bin 549 (I think), a kenyan, and one from PNG, the interesting thing was that the coffees were pulled at different stages of the roasting process, so it was possible to taste the differences as they progress through the stages of roasting.

I’ve been gone just over 2 weeks, and I’m trying hard to go native, so I have my thongs, my short-blacks and flat-whites, and I’m getting there with saying chips when I mean crisps.

So starting back in London, it seems that no matter how well prepared I think I am, I always have to stay up all night before I go somewhere finishing off last minute things. So when the cab came at 7 I’d caught 45 minutes of semi-sleep, and was feeling a bit trampish. The only shower was in the travelex business centre, so i grabbed a massive handful of complementary sweets and spent 20 minutes luxuriating in a quite dodgy shower. One of the better uses of £14 I can think of!

The flight was cool, I stole the blanket and it makes a very nice scarf. I watched 3 films and spent a long time staring at how much nothing there is just before Las Vegas.

In LA I stayed with Josh’s parents, who are very cool. They gave me a little self contained room, and the most amazing sweet grapefruits.

On the first day I was spotted as the weird guy looking for the sunny spot outside a cafe (while all the native LA people were looking for spots near the patio heaters) by a girl (Meaghan) who turns out did the same exchange as I’m doing, except she was at sciarc and was at rmit 3 years ago. Quite the coincidence!

LA is not a city that is really geared towards people who don’t drive. But I walked anyway, and probably covered about 10 or 15 miles a day taking in a lot of designer places and that sort of stuff. On the second day I decided to go to the beach, but forgot to get off the bus and ended up half way to Malibu near a ‘park’ (some wilderness with paths) so I went for a bit of a jaunt into the hills and then walked to Santa Monica beach (which is further than it looks on a map).

Where I started the beach bike path was empty, and as I got closer and closer to Venice it got busier and more packed with people posturing in their sparkly ‘correct’ sports kit. The funny thing is that most people really didn’t know what they were doing, 4k road bikes with beach cruiser setups, people on skates falling forwards at about the same speed as they were moving, challenging physics and just about staying up.

As I got to Santa Monica, I heard someone yell ‘Ben’, it took a while to register seeing as I was in a city where nobody knew my name, but it turned out to be Meaghan, (so we are stacking up the odds pretty high here). She was with the same guy that she’d been with at lunch the day before, so we all went for dinner at a place called the library ale house (fine beer and tasty nosh, all in a nice place by some sciarc dude).

I’m struggling with the ability to give off the ‘I’m single, come and chat me up’ vibe to women in quite the same way that I do to men, a dude in the Diesel shop spent a long time showing me jeans that I couldn’t afford, and I’m pretty sure he knew that.

Anyway, I met up with Stephanie Gary, the bike patrol’s American envoy (due to the special Gary clause), and she drove me around LA a bit (it makes more sense in a car) and then we went to the beach to see the nutters roller dancing, doing henna tattoos and smoking ‘medicinal’ marijuana. Then as we walked along the only street in LA that it felt normal to be walking on (Abbot Kinney, very nice) Meaghan stuck her head out of her car window and said hello, if you’d bet on this on an accumulator at your local tote you’d be turning a pound into at least a million.

I went to the Gehry office on the last day to speak to the GT people about geeky stuff and do some sort of 18^th century introduction thing. Very interesting stuff, and it looks like a nice place to work on the main gehry shop floor.

American airports are crap.

So, finally in Melbourne, it’s lovely here.

The weather is great, sunny, but not too hot (for me, but I like it hot, so maybe I’m a bad judge)

I’ve been visiting cafes as a way of forcing myself to visit different neighbourhoods, and the baseline standard of coffee here is so good, the worst coffee I’ve had here is better than you’d get in most cafes in the UK, and the best is just superb the only place in the UK that comes close is flat white.

the best so far is st ali roasters, and i’m going for a public cupping session tomorrow at lunch time, woooo!

I’m working in a practice, and as far as practice work goes, it’s pretty good, but I’m on the verge of making a proper career decision that I’m not really interested in architecture as it is practiced in the real world. I love teaching, researching new working methods and thinking about big ideas, but I don’t think I have the patience to be a straight practitioner. This is going to take a bit more thought as to how it pans out in the long term, and whether it’s just me being adverse to real work.

Being the geek I am, I’ve got into the dorkbot scene here, and they all seem really nice, and very welcoming. Yesterday was an amazing presentation by Robert henke who does super cool live performance techno.

And… I’ve bought a bike, it’s yellow, and it’s a ‘proper’ track bike (but I put a brake on, cos I’m a wimp). I’m not in the shape I thought I was in. I did about 8-10 laps of the velodrome and nearly puked. The banking is so much steeper than I’d imagined it would be, I was struggling to keep the bike on the track in the bends. this challenge with CT is going to be an interesting race

Anyway, I need to post this, and I’ll link to it on FB.

More soon, promise, honest.

Kisses

I came across this while looking for large diameter balloons for a cluster ballooning experiment