Heaven & Time

I've been thinking today about heaven, as a result of lying awake at night trying to picture things such as eternity (never will get my head around that).  What I find scary is that in eternity there is no such dimension as time.  Here on earth, time rules. For people in the city, time flies as their goal is largely to build as much wealth in their short working life as possible.

Goals, I believe, are a part of what drives us.  We plan to achieve goals in certain periods of time, whether that be cooking dinner, buying a home, taking the gospel to people or solving world poverty.  Without goals life would be pretty boring.  Just like the Sims. Once you've built the house, reached the top career level, had a family, the Sims suddenly has no appeal.

Christians won't have these kinds of goals in heaven as far as I know, and if there's no time to make goals in, what will we spend eternity doing?  I nearly said days.... Anyway we do have clues of course, we'll definitely get to meet our maker face to face, and worship and glorify Him as He deserves.  Off the top of my head, there will be work to do.  But back to what I've been dwelling on today, heaven without time and the many things that affects.  Here are a few questions:

• Will food go off?
• Will our hair grow?
• How long will it take to do anything?
• And my brain has stopped working but you get the picture. 

renders

Here are some renders from my uni project this semester (the Aboriginal art gallery).  I'm pretty happy with them, though as usual they definitely could have used a lot more work if I'd been disiplined enough to get them done earlier.

In case you wanted to be an architect/work in the building industry

Make sure you have a passion for it because my experience of it so far is that its 80% arguing/co-ordination and 20% productivity.  Involving a great deal of misunderstanding and many painful meetings hence why projects take so long to complete.

I've learnt a lot about aesthetics and the Brisbane housing industry over the last semester, the greatest finding being how closely linked they are with consumerism.  If you can convince people to want and need things, then you're onto a winner.  And in Brisbane this has resulted in the mass production of generic, unresponsive boring homes placed in mega suburb developments such as North Lakes. As an architect (almost) this makes me cringe, seeing these things fill our landscape and shaping our identity.

Though they are filling a housing need, I believe these sprawling homes are definitely not the answer.  It is well known that Brisbane is rapidly growing and as such we need to start following the bigger cities and building up density in the inner city before we expand to the suburbs.  Our terrible traffic conditions are a testament to the fact that the city cannot cope with such widespread housing development.  Unfortunately however people do not like change, and hold onto the 'Australian dream'  of owning your own house with a backyard.

That's enough ranting for now, but what it comes down to is consumerism, and as some people I interviewed on the topic said, people want a house with a double garage for their nice cars and they want all the latest technology (look at the ipad, who needs one? you want one because it's awesome and everyone has one) and space for their nice things.  Unfortunately, unless Brisbane residents have a major shift in values, the boring, unresponsive generic homes and gonna keep flowing like water.

Daylighting in ecotect

These are some pics of testing my gallery model in ecotect for daylighting.  It just shows the direct daylight that enters the building  at critical times of the year.  I've actually decided to open up my building to the west, because I feel the sun is an integral part of the Aboriginal culture and their connection to the land.  Considering they have the sun on their flag also.  Though generally this is a no no in building design as we want to avoid the hot afternoon sun, I feel for this particular design it is appropriate.  Below are the ecotect images.

Summer - 9am

Summer - 3pm

Spring/Autumn - 9am

Spring/Autumn - 3pm

Winter - 9am

Winter - 3pm

Models take 2

Here are a second lot of rough models we were required to do to inform our gallery design.  These certainly aren't my best work, they were just quick experimental models but they helped communicate various aspects of what I'm trying to achieve with form, texture etc.

Design progressing and max fun

Been working on my art gallery design, it's really coming along!  I began with the theatre, and have come up with a form that I came up with during the modelling exercise which you can see in the last post.  I'm really happy with it though it's got a long way to go before it resembles a complete building.  Here are pics of what I've been playing with

Modelling

Here are some massing model exercises we were required to complete to help our design. I found them very helpful in exploring different forms and configurations now that I have the program for my site worked out.  Sorry about the picture formatting! I'm still figuring out how this blog stuff works...