Term has started here, and things have got considerably more hectic. I’m doing an elective to do with food production and distribution in the city, and one called ‘death by architecture’ which is basically entering loads of competitions.

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.