Asylum Bound - 1-24-12

Artist rendering of our meeting.

A relatively laid back day, all in all, we kicked it off with a trip to Unitec, a vocational, technical college that focuses solely in Engineering, Architecture, and Construction.  Their campus is about a 20 minute bus ride outside of the main center in Auckland in an adaptively reused insane asylum.  Gives this educational medium satirically ironic undertones, I would say, and it made our meeting feel as though we were ourselves in a nut house and having a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest moment.  Not quite a building I was thinking of studying in my thesis, but it is still an interesting structure as the school is extremely limited as to what they can do with partitions, leaving an entire wing full of padded wall cells.  I thought walking down the hall of Haley was eerie.

asylum. 

Asylum funyard.

Either way, it was interesting talking with several of the faculty of Unitec about everything construction for several hours.  We were all relatively low key, quiet and altogether droll; presumably due to the 4 week slump we all seem to be in.  Strange phenomenon, but either way this was a valuable experience in making good contacts and learning some particulars of construction in New Zealand that we may otherwise never have considered.  Small country with not a lot of infrastructure, so things are quite different here than they are in the much more built up Australian neighbor.  4.2 million people in the whole of the country and almost half of them live in Auckland.  The urge to get into the countryside was all but overwhelming.

Awesome adaptive reuse.

The afternoon was spent free, and I took the time to go into town, have some of the best fish and chips ever on Vulcan Alley - served by one of the best looking Brazilians I had ever met - and headed to the Auckland art museum to study one of the more impressively maintained historical buildings I have seen so far down south.  Everyone else headed off to nap, blog, and what have you, so I was flying solo, an admittedly nice afternoon, if I don't say so myself.  I don't understand art, but I enjoy it and spent a lot of time simply wandering through the halls, taking in the eclectic array of work all the while studying, documenting, and enjoying the construction of this beautifully reused historical building - something I am much more keen to.  Refreshing afternoon and a whole lot of gained information, knowledge, and thoughts on this building.  Pretty successful day, and it is off to the Black Beaches of Piha to hopefully climb something, ride a wave, jump off something or an activity of the like.  Life's good.

Cheers.