A visual summary of my Melbourne trip.

Amazing street art all over the place but this is one of my favourite. Saw a few of the same artist around too - anyone know who did this? (in Stevenson Lane near Chinatown)

Federation Square

Just a mall but had so much architectural effect to the whole thing.

RMIT building by Lyons Architects

The grand hall inside the National Gallery of Victoria - stunning piece of stained glass with Victorian motifs.

Cranes were a common sight, guess Melbourne is developing around its architectural heritage.

National Library of Victoria with two exhibition spaces on the circular spaces wrapping around this central area.

RMIT Design Hub, explored the inside of it quite thoroughly.

One of the many laneways that epitomises Melbourne.

The 'Pixel Building'

An old laneway converted into the lobby of a hotel. Notice the attempt at acknowledging the heritage architecture on the right by an imperfect mirroring.

COCA - contemporary art, unfortunately closed when I went there!

An art installation in the main lobby of NGV, the bowls circulated the water pool and every time they bumped a clear ring of ceramic can be heard. There are also more photos on my Google+ album.

A flurry of upgrades are planned for Dominion Road and it really does need it. The simple 4 lane median strip road stretches almost from coast to coast (or at least the CBD) through the centre of the Auckland isthmus. It lags behind in providing transport infrastructure for future needs.

Currently the green bus lanes are supposed to be for cyclists too although countless encounters between buses and bicycles easily prove it is a terrible way to integrate cycling. Furthermore, the bus lanes are only exclusively for buses (and cycles as an afterthought) during the rush hour and, at other times, allow parked cars to disrupt even this provision. It's not pleasant at all.

The strategy for providing a cycleway has taken the form of a 'parallel' cycleway - taking cycles away from the straight but busy Dominion Road and into the parallel back streets. It's a bit twisty and turny, but I've cycled all the way down a few times and its nice on a fine day. At the very least, cyclists aren't constantly breathing the fumes of buses and in danger of being hit by vehicles.
However, this strategy can also be seen as marginalising a healthy and sustainable method of transport. Perhaps if they create a really pleasant cycle infrastructure along the marked routes, people will be encouraged to give it a go instead of the car.

Feedback is now being sought! One of the public days has just passed today, but there will be another 3:30pm - 7:00pm at Dominion Road Primary School on Thursday (25th July). Go and talk to the planners and give suggestions as to how this all could develop into a great cycleway. Visit the Auckland Transport page for more information, or to submit feedback online.

Brake House by Ron Sang

Yesterday I had the rare chance to tour the famous Brake House in Titirangi thanks to the Auckland Architecture Association. Designed by architect Ron Sang, a prominent Chinese New Zealander, the house was completed in 1976, before leaky building syndromes and building regulation reforms. The elegance of the house in Titirangi's signature wild naturesque landscape reminded many of American designs like Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House.

Immediately upon entering the house, you felt the sense of attention to detail that encompassed the architecture of that period. The platform leading into the house had a precarious edginess to it. Eventually we figured it out - a lack of our standardised contemporary handrails. Any such feature (your usual 1m high, grabbable railing) would have destroyed the elegance of the design entirely.

Incredible reflections all throughout the house, merging nature and architecture.

The architect Ron Sang came and gave us an intimate insight to the making of this house.

Visiting this house is such an inspiration, but as Ron Sang said, there is no way such a house can be built as it is now because of the many regulatory constraints. Back in the 70s, this building only needed 20 A1 sheets to document it - these days you would need at least 100 sheets marking the incredible change that the architectural profession has had over the years. The fusion of Asian and American design in the woodiness of Titirangi is an incredible feat though and, for those who afford it, it is currently up for sale.

Baches are a staple of New Zealand architecture and it is where NZ architects get a lot of space (in every sense of the word) to experiment and work with our natural landscape. This bach by Min Hall frames the sea element with generous glazing and large deck spaces. What I like most about this bach is how it is split up into modules to fit around the trees. It's not the only one to do that (the McCahon Artist Residence by Pete Bossley springs to mind) and you can imagine the architecture maturing as the trees grow up around it.


See HOME New Zealand's article - Outtakes: A beautiful beach getaway by Min Hall for more.

An interesting article on Co.LABS highlights the significance of scale with platforms like Twitter. When you send one package of data off to another person, that seems like a pretty simple thing with the internet. But Twitter is a vastly upscaled version of that - 150 million active users (the most active ones probably fire off a tweet at every moment's whim). That's a lot of packages to send through.

When things fail, you end up with the 'fail whale' page and although the meme is cute, the situation of not being able to use the service definitely isn't.

Twitter is constantly upgrading its infrastructure to deal with this mass of tweets. You can imagine how many bits of data need to be sent if a big star with millions of followers drops a tweet, followed by a flurry of retweets, etc. There will always be a bottleneck and a bit of clever shifting allows the data base to cope.

In the same way, when cities become bigger (we talk of metropolises and megalopolis, with more to come, I'm sure), the infrastructure needs to change with it. How to transport, water and feed millions more people in a concentrated area is a big question with our current rate of growth. For instance, the plans for a future Auckland has sparked debate on many fronts - even a whole different scheme for our transport system created by transport enthusiasts on the Auckland Transport Blog. Careful thought has to go into infrastructure alongside any future growth.

We don't want our city becoming an urban fail whale.

"We know there is still a lot of work to be done. Our transport infrastructure puts us behind other cities on the international indices, and handicaps our people and our economy."
- Mayor Len Brown, Mayor of Auckland