Coming to my senses.

I realize it's been a while since updating my whereabouts and happenings in Australia so I will try to attempt to catch you up. Studio has been going well, we are fully into design mode and had our first presentation/critique on Monday. We visited some art museums last week and did this amazing walk on Thursday from Bondi Beach to Coogee, stopping along the way for lunch and a discussion with Adrian concerning sustainability. Yes, it's winter here and yes, walking along this beautiful ocean is considered school for me.....I LOVE IT! Friday and the weekend we got out of the city and headed west to the Blue Mountains. Friday we met a member of a local aboriginal tribe who led us on a 7 hour hike through the mountains that included scaling rocks and walking on mossy logs across raging streams. A little out of my comfort zone but amazing and potentially a new found love. Saturday we did some more hiking, went to a book discussion for our professor's book, and made dinner for a group of us, sat around eating, drinking wine, and having great conversation in the mountains. Back to reality here in Sydney though. This week is relatively calm so it gives a good chance to dig into school work. 

fully into school mode

I decided to share pictures through a blog since sending of pictures will take forever to send over e-mail. For those of you who don't know, this quarter in Australia we are focusing on sustainable aspects of design, not only on the ecological front, but perhaps more importantly, on the human civilization front. We are concerned with our footprint on this earth both ecologically but also how we treat each other as human beings. More conversations from that to come. Our design project is to design a mobile and demountable art gallery space for these Artist Run Initiatives (ARI's) here in Sydney. The idea is that these ARI's can rent the mobile gallery for a period of time and display their art anywhere in the city, bucking the system of the bureaucratic system of art museums and galleries. The structures would be up for maybe a day or two, which means they don't need to follow code or anything. They will be in protest the incredibly commercialized and commodified art Museums and Galleries. More to come on that as well. School's been going great so far. We have had so many AMAZING opportunities to meet people who are leading figures in both the art and architecture world. Perhaps one of the most influential people in my eyes that we have met is a man named Paul Pholeros. He's an architect by trade but has created this initiative called Health Habitat where he goes around to aboriginal housing, employs the aboriginals to fix simple household problems like running water, electricity, and hot water. These homes don't have something as simple as running water and the government dismisses the problem as "unruly aboriginals" when really the root of the problem was poor government housing. It makes me sick. Paul has helped over 6,000 homes as of now re-institute electricity and running water but employing the aboriginal people, empowering them and giving them a sense of being and hope. It was like an a-ha moment for me because I finally had tangible evidence of what I have been looking for in the design community. More updates and pictures to come later