Everyone had congregated in the small cafe at the Village (just beside the entrance), so I went inside to wait for Anoop to give the signal to leave. While I waited, I got to thinking about lunch options (it was nearing midday) when Anoop said RMIT would not be providing lunch for us as they did yesterday. I had eaten breakfast not long ago, so I wasn't particularly hungry. To keep from getting hungry during our site visits, I decided to buy a tea and a small apple cinnamon muffin. After I payed for the small snack, Anoop gave the signal to head out.
We ended up going straight to the site instead of meeting first at the RMIT campus. The first site was the Melbourne Convention Centre which was already completed and occupied. Upon approach, I thought I recognized the name of the building from research I have done concerning 6 Star Green Star Rated buildings in Melbourne, so I was excited that this building could potentially serve as a case study option in Melbourne for my thesis!
We arrived at the Convention Centre that sits alongside the Yarra River in the Docklands precinct of Melbourne and met a staff member of RMIT at the entrance. About 5 minutes later, a man named Clive showed up and introduced himself as our tour guide. Without further ado, we began our tour! (I managed to leave my camera in my room at the Village (of course), so I was not able to take any pictures during the tour.) In his opening statements about the building, Clive confirmed what I thought I remembered - the Convention Centre is indeed a 6 Star building!
Clive took us all over the massive Centre and each time we entered a new room, I was amazed. (Along with everyone else on the tour.) The attention to detail in the design of each space was absolutely incredible. Any size group that could possible need to have a convention or meeting could find a space that they could customize to fit their numbers. (This avoids a convention of, say, 200 beam line scientists meeting in an auditorium built for 5,000.) Rooms (no matter how large or small) were fully equipped with a full assortment of A/V connections and the lights in the ceiling could even be customized to shine a corporate colors on the walls. Floor access to A/V controls were every 9 meters throughout the entire front of house, allowing the possibility for a convention to setup hundreds of displays outside the meeting rooms. Basically, the Centre was designed to house multiple convention simultaneously (whether local, national, international - regardless of size), without any conventions overlapping space and interfering with each other.
Great care had gone into the design of the interior environment and I was thoroughly impressed by the level of detail that the architects had gone to in order to make the building multifaceted, multi-functional, and easily adaptable as need arises.
This level of detail continued, as Clive took us to the "Back of House" so we could see how the building staff operates behind the scenes. The design of the building ensured that nothing from the back of house (like food trolleys or janitor carts) ever came into contact with the front of house. Moreover, each banquet room is serviced by some 32 kitchens (each serviced from the master kitchen) and food is designed to take no longer than 1 minute to reach a table from the time it leaves the kitchen. The kitchen area was a marvel in itself. The necessity to separate clean from dirty and still maintain proximity kitchen-to-kitchen through the multiple floors of the buildings had been satisfied with a circular motion design. Every morsel of food served is prepared fresh in the kitchens (that master chefs can have up to 10 ovens and setup their space however they like, which is different from chef to chef), including pastries which are made in the pastry kitchen. The dish washing area was incredibly extensive and even included microchips (linked to a control computer) in each dish container that can tell the staff the location of each container at any time.
Continuing through the back of house, we saw truck lifts and truck doors in the building that would enable Mercedes, for instance, to drive a show car up to the back of the building and within 5 minutes have it displayed (with custom lighting) on the third floor of the Centre.
I could ramble on for hours about the features of the Centre, but I will stop at the explanation above. Clive provided us with a great marketing tour of the building and we were much appreciative of his time and knowledge. Unfortunately we were not able to see any of the technical aspects of the building (like the solar panel system on the roof and blackwater recycling system) that Reel, Jay, and I need for our theses, but I definitely enjoyed the tour. Clive left each of us with a hardbound book that went into detail about how the project was delivered (Public Private Partnership) before heading out to the next item on his agenda.
We did not linger long after the tour of the Convention Centre, as RMIT had scheduled another site tour (this time a building under construction). We took a tram to this site, which turned out to be another high rise apartment building. This building only had the structural system of a few floors (out of around 22 floors) completed, but we were given a full tour and explanation of the project by the management team. The building seemed to be typical, except for the location of the tower crane, which had been strategically positioned in the middle of the building to save site space. The portion of the building that it created a whole in was designed to only go up three floors (the rest of the building would continue 22 levels), so after the crane services are complete, only three floors will have to be filled in. Everyone was able to ask questions and after only about an hour we were done with site visiting for the day!
A little tired from all the walking around, we returned (via tram) to the Village (Why hello camera, nice of you not to tag along to the sites...), at which time I took a wonderful nap. I woke up around 7:00pm and decided to head out to the grocery store to stock up on some more food instead of eating out at a restaurant. I walked a few blocks down the street to the Coles Central, as it was the only open grocery store close to the Village. Realizing I had not taken any pictures yet to include in the blog, I brought my camera along. (Yeah I brought my camera to the grocery store...) I actually did manage to get a neat picture though, as the Central mall has a massive dome that was built around a tall smoke stack (or some kind of chimney) of an old Shot Glass Factory. Here is a picture of the dome, looking up from underneath:
Groceries in hand, I returned to my room to heat up some Chunky Soup. Dinner was wonderful, especially since the soup was only A$4 and the apple and milk were also inexpensive. I checked my email after dinner to see that Professor Olsen, who is teaching the Construction Law course this semester at Auburn, had emailed the students currently abroad to provide us a copy of the syllabus and a link to the video of the first class period. I was pretty tired, but I decided to go ahead and watch the video and not procrastinate. It was only a little over 27 minutes long, which was great because my attention span after a full day was quite short. When the video ended, I saved my notes and then crawled into bed to get some sleep. Another great day Down Under!
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