Well our time here is coming to an end. It does seem as if we saved the best tour of a building for last! Throughout the morning we were got a chance to visit with the head of the construction school at RMIT. He was extremely knowledgeable and was able to answer all of our questions. He also spent about fifteen minutes on one of my questions about cheap labor in Melbourne which I got a lot out of. I had a great time. After a talk with him he gave us a very detailed tour of the campus. It was a lot bigger than expected and extremely nice. It was interesting how they use a lot of escalators on each floor to try and promote not using the elevator. This is because the architect and owner wanted visitors and other people to get a full experience of each floor every time they visited. This also provides elevators for the people at higher floors who need them the most. After the tour we continued on to an incredible building. It was a building for the RMIT business students and is a major 12 story mixed space that will be used mainly for retail, student lounge areas, classrooms, lecture halls, faculty office, theaters for the students at night, and it also comes with gigantic study rooms that are “smart” and have two story tall ceilings to try and get the students to stay on campus to study. The owner and architect were not afraid to push this building to the limits in terms of new designs and crazy color schemes. The building had very little symmetry on the walls and the ceilings and the colors were just as crazy as the shape of the interior structures. I can’t imagine having to be a project manager on this site. It seemed as if every detail was thought out for many months and the architect was not afraid to push the contractors at all. Most of their windows and steel came from Germany and some windows that were no larger than 10’x5’ cost them 200,000 dollars to produce and ship over. Pretty crazy!
After we left we went straight to a local pub to grab their 50 cent wings they were serving. It turns out that some of the people in our group were pretty hungry. Some people ate 35 wings! I stuck with 10. I look forward to heading to the Melbourne Museum of Art tomorrow to experience some of their local culture!
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