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.