The Buildings Keep Getting Better

Wednesday morning here in Melbourne came with cooler weather and a breeze. The only problem was that this comfortable weather was not in our rooms, as I woke up to a hot and stuffy air condition-less room. I had planned on going for a nice jog but since I felt like I had gotten enough exercise in my sleep from the heat I decided I would opt out of that. We had nothing planned until 1 p.m. this afternoon where we headed back to RMIT University. After arriving, we were given a brief tour of the campus by the head of the Construction Management school and he answered some questions that a few of us had. This lasted for about an hour then we headed across the street to where the university was building a new 11 story 180 million dollar business school. After visiting Melbourne's convention center I wasn't sure a building could get any cooler or more absurd but this one did the trick. The architects that designed this building seemed to have free reign to do whatever they could think of. Yes, this was apparently a nightmare for all of the construction workers but they make 130,000 dollars a year so who's complaining. There is simply just too many design details to explain in this post without making it four pages long but here are some that stood out to me. The center opening that housed stairwells running from the ground up was a nightmare when it came to forming of the slabs. None of the slabs had the same shape so if you were to lay down and look straight up, you would see 10 different slab shapes and none of them would line up or be the same. Crazy. This building is a 5 Star Green Star building so like the Convention Center was equipped with some very sophisticated and environmentally friendly technology, materials, and building practices. Click HERE to get a glimpse of what my pictures can't do. I strongly suggest checking out the video and the concept images to see just how insane and awesome this building is going to be once completed! After a few hours touring this building we reluctantly gave back our hard hats and headed back to the apartments and going straight to WING NIGHT. It was by far the most American dinner we have had so far since being in Australia. Wings, fries (called chips here), and beer. It was a pretty epic meal being that as a group we demolished 200 wings basically cleaning out this poor places kitchen. Our plans for tomorrow are unknown to us but since we don't meet until 1:30 I can catch up on some work in the a.m. and maybe get that run in finally. Cheers!