Week One - Unit Introduction

Today/this week we were introduced to our exciting assignment relating to the CAPIThetical Competition. Luckily I have just been in Canberra and talking to my sisters friends (my sister lives in Canberra) they all thought it was a very interesting idea to redesign Canberra and even a good topic for a university design subject! Although not directly connected to parliament, my sister works for a government division and has many views on what could be improved upon.

In our lecture we looked at the strategies of design (not solely a building but built form) relating to our four major themes of Flexible, Mobile, Distributed and Virtual.

What first came to mind when looking back on the lecture for this week was how old the parliamentary system is in Australia. Although Australia is not an old country we have taken elements from other countries to create our own parliament, part of our brief is to update our area of parliament to be relevant in the 21stC. Looking at this through our themes there are many very interesting and developing technologies that can be integrated into our  system to bring it up to speed (date).

Presence and Identity was another theme that remained in my mind after the lecture. When thinking of other countries such as France and England for example if visiting these countries the first cities we think of are Paris and London which are these countries capitals, they are exciting and famous and the heart of each however when thinking of visiting Australia I doubt that people first think to visit Canberra. So why is it that people don't want to visit Canberra? Is it just a place for grade 6 classes to visit and study for school? Is it just a city for the government to function from? Can it be made to be desirable?

When thinking about iconic symbolism and identity I realised how well I knew what our parliament building looked like. A simple google image search can show how identifiable the structure is, but is this just because I see it on the news or would people from other countries be able to identify our parliament like we can with many others?

    

 A quick video showing the inside of parliament house (accessable by the public)